Mini Sculpture

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 Choice

Each team member individually brainstormed 1-2 concepts for our mini sculpture:

• Ping Pong: A foam board controlled by a motor and a velocity sensor hits back marbles

• Color Sort (pulley): A motor-powered pulley sorts marbles based on information from a color sensor

• Color Sort (elevator): A similar concept to the pulley design, but it instead uses a motor-powered elevator to sort the marbles

• Button Dropper: Marbles hit a touch sensor, which activate a motor-powered trapdoor.

• Marble Counter: An optical sensor counts the number of marbles that pass by, and after reaching a certain number, a motor-powered trapdoor activates

Based on the positives and negatives of each design (see Pugh chart), the concept that we chose from our brainstorming was the Color Sort (elevator). Coolness outweighed simplicity and reliability, so the Elevator Color Sort was chosen instead of the Button Dropper despite being more complicated.

Results

The operation of the design that we chose was to sort different colored marbles using our joystick-operated motor, creating an elevator type of effect, using the color sensor we programmed it to recognize the different colors sending the information to our motor switching levels in order to drop the marbles in different baskets.