As part of the course Mechatronics and Robotics Design III, we were tasked with designing a robot from scratch that could autonomously follow a line and then be manually controlled via a Logitech controller in order to navigate around a created map. The goal was to pick up various toys such as plastic dinosaurs and a Ken doll, as well as place them in a cage for easy collection. The main challenge in this project was creating the robot off of limited resources. We were only given access to 3 servo motors, 2 DC motors, a RaspberryPi Pico, breadboard, some wiring components and very limited filament for 3D printing custom parts and some MDF board for laser cutting so we had to be clever with the design. This is how the 'Dragon Breath' robot was born!!

Due to the restrictions on resources, we were limited on potential designs. After careful planning with my teammate we landed on a 4 wheeled robot with front wheel drive differential drive to steer, with a 2 DOF base-actuated parallel linkage robotic arm on top to grab the various toys. We also opted to use 3D printed TPU rather than PLA for the gripper and wheels to allow more flexibility to bend around the toys of different shapes and sizes and to increase the friction between wheel and ground, preventing slipping. The design also features a loading platform on the base large enough to store a dinosaur in which we had an automated command for the arm to autonomously grab the dino from that platform and place it in the cage. 

My main focus on this project was the mechanical design of the robot and the  sensor/actuator integration. Using Onshape I was able to design most of what you see on the robot, with most of my time spent trying to design the perfect arm for our application. I decided to go with a base actuated arm as I wanted the motors to keep some load on the back end of the robot to offset the load of the arm carrying the toys and the batteries stored on the front underside of the robot. The gripper was printed using TPU in order to provide flexibility to bend around the awkward shape of the toys while also being supported by laser cut MDF board to provide more strength for corralling the heavier toys. I utilized laser cutting to shape the MDF board to serve as the base of our robot and for any parts that didn't need complex geometry.