Team 34

The Defenestrator

Sam Daitch - Mat Willmott - Rebecca Spangenthal

(click on the picture for a larger view from a different angle)

Building the defenestrator was a lot harder than any of us expected. Initially, when we came up with our strategy of grabbing the ball from our opponent’s side and taking it back to our side, we thought we would be able to grab 6 or 7 balls in the 60 seconds. We soon learned that concepts that work theoretically do not necessarily work in actuality.

The first problem we ran into was building our robot within the one-foot cube box. We had to redesign our robot numerous times to get the robot to be 11.99 inches in length. Our wheels also went through many versions. We decided that we were up for the challenge of designing and programming a synchrodrive driving system. (Synchrodrive is where the wheels turn so that the robot doesn’t have to.)

The decision to use synchrodrive might not have been our best decision. Although we were able to build the robot physically, we had a lot of trouble turning the wheels to the exact angle that we needed. We tried using a potentiometer to measure it, a shaft encoder, and actual physical blockers. By the third week, we thought we were all ready for the competition. Our code was done, our robot fit all the specifications, it could drive forward, back, left, and right. Additionally, the Defenestrator’s arms could sense a ball with its distance sensor, go forward, and grab the ball. We were all set!

However, building a robot is not that simple. When we tried to put everything together (turning, driving, grabbing, ect.) the Defenestrator’s wheels would always become misaligned. We took apart our entire robot 4 days before the competition, and although we improved our performance, we were still not able to control the turn of our wheels with enough precision.

As a team, we really enjoyed every aspect of 6.270 including living in the lab for 3 weeks. We feel like we really learned a lot with all of the experience we gained.

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