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Objectives
Objectives
During the second week of the COSMOS Cluster 2 on Engineering Design and Control of Kinetic Sculptures, our team members learned how to program using RobotC to process sensor data and to control a motor in a Motion Robot. The concepts of automatic sensor data processing and controlling the motion of a component in a Kinetic Sculpture led to the design requirements of a Mini Sculpture. The Mini Sculpture design is a team effort that is completed during the third week of the COSMOS Cluster 2.
Design Requirements
Design Requirements
The design requirements for the mini sculpture are that the sculpture should be active and automatic, should have a sensor and a servomotor, and the mini sculpture should have a user interface. The user interface may be in the form of a push button, knob, or anything that can be interacted with via the NXT in order to move the servomotor manually.
Design Choice
Design Choice
Our initial brainstorm produced 4 main design concepts: H-Belt, Auto Catch, Trapdoor, and Catch Game. After a short period of prototyping to analyze risks of each design, we categorized and scored each design on a set of qualities in a Pugh chart. Our final design choice for the mini sculpture was the Catch Game because it sounded fun, interactive, and plausible within our limitations.
Results
Results
The resulting design from this mini-project was a three-stage structure that implements a joystick controller for the user interface and a feedback system to make the sculpture fully autonomous. The top level of the sculpture has a ramp that launches the marble to the second stage, where either the autonomous algorithm will accurately position the basket to catch it, or the user will control the basket to attempt to catch the marble. Finally, regardless of a successful catch or not, the marble will enter a wide collection ramp and roll down to a chain lift that will bring the marble back up to the start. To further improve the design, we hope to implement a variable ramp end angle in the future.
Below is a video of our mini-sculpture in complete autonomous mode and a rough simulation using a software known as Working Model 2D. The video of our autonomous mode is in the bottom left. You can see the marble roll down the elevated ramp through a speed sensor. The sensor relays the information to the motor, through the Lego NXT controller. The motor then moves the basket to the marble's projected position after leaving the ramp. The marble falls through the basket and onto a collection ramp. The ramp feeds into a continuously moving chain which deposits the marble back at the beginning of the system to run again. The chain also acts as a spacer for the marbles.
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