Objectives

During the fourth and last week of the COSMOS Cluster 2 on Engineering Design and Control of Kinetic Sculptures, our team has to integrate the Mini Sculpture concept(s) into a working Full Kinetic Sculpture. Lessons learned during the prototyping of the Mini Sculpture are now applied to ensure the Full Sculpture operates autonomously and is robust to any design or programming errors found during the Mini Sculpture design.

Design Requirements

The full sculpture must include a user interface so that the user can make an input and affect how the sculpture operates. The sculpture must also have at least one sensor that controls a motor so that a moving part of the sculpture is controlled automatically. All of the sensing, user input, and actuations must be automated together in a program. There cannot be multiple different programs that can only run one functionality at the same time. The full sculpture must be reliable enough to not drop any balls and look professional(meaning no more tape).

3D Prints

Challenges

Within the design and manufacturing process we came along many challenges that had to be overcome. While some of these challenges were small things such as adjusting a ramp to make sure the ball would fall onto another ramp, we also came across a few larger problems that took more time to solve. The first of the problems we encountered was making the shooter more reliable. In order to fix this problem we were required to add more support to the tracks to acquire more stability, raise the height of the tracks it was launched off to ensure it would go a far enough distance, remove one of the wheels to reduce the chance of one of the motors causing a ball to fall, and we decided to add a backdrop and cushioning to the catcher so the ball wouldn't bounce out or fly past the catcher. Another problem we were met with was the trampoline that would bounce the ball into a funnel being very inconsistent. This was solved through adding a piece of cloth in order to stop the ball from being overshot or bouncing out, additionally, the coding in the motor was changed to ensure that if the ball were to be inaccurate, it would launch over the funnel instead of short of it. The final unseen challenge that we came across was the limit on the number of resources available, which forced us to improvise and pick and choose where complete stability was necessary. This problem was especially challenging with the number of clips that would allow us to connect tubes to the middle of other tubes. We found a solution in using one clip that was meant to support tracks with one of the clips that was meant to attach tubes to other tubes. While this sacrificed some of the security of the tubes in places, it granted enough stability to allow the sculpture to operate consistently.