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In the projects involving the mini sculpture and the full sculpture, students work in teams to analyze, simulate and fabricate kinetic sculptures that combine motion sensing with motion control to create dynamic structures and report their findings in their Team Webpage.
Sculpture Hardware
Sculpture Hardware
The hardware for creating the mini and full sculpture is based on the commercially available Chaos Tower Marble Run STEM Toy. This hardware consists of blue tubes and black connectors to create the support system and various tracks, baskets, trampolines, pendula to guides the movement of marbles through the structure. In addition, the structure comes with a chained lift/elevator system to transport marbles back to the top (potential energy) before releasing the marbles through the structure (kinetic energy). The students in this Cluster on Engineering Design and Control of Kinetic Sculptures will also augment the structure with Lego NXT (mindstorm) motion sensors and motors, while developing motion control algorithms in RobotC to create a surprisingly dynamic structure during the mini sculpture and full sculpture projects.
For more details on how to put together the different parts, see the Chaos Toy Instructions.
Mini Sculpture Project
Mini Sculpture Project
Objectives
Objectives
The Mini Kinetic Sculpture Design Project is used as the prototyping phase in a typical design project. This project helps students with the understanding of:
time and project management with their team
hardware of the kinetic sculpture kit
running (control) simulations with Working Model 2D
interfacing with the NXT hardware
development of (control) algorithms in RobotC.
To tie things together, we use a systematic design process involving risk analysis and a Pugh chart to help start and initiate the design of the Mini Kinetic Sculpture.
Requirements
Requirements
The Mini Kinetic Sculpture must be actively controlled and function automatically. To accomplish this, the design of the Mini Kinetic Sculpture is subjected to the following requirements:
At least one motion sensor (ball position, velocity, counting or color).
At least one (servo)motor to dynamically change a part/component in the Mini Sculpture.
The (servo)motor should be controlled automatically by the measurements of the motion sensor.
At least one Human Interface component (button/dial) to influence automatic operation.
Can only use 1 Lego NXT Mindstorm for motion control via RobotC.
Analysis of motion control behavior with a WM2D simulation.
Documentation of design, analysis, simulation and proof of operation in a team webpage.
Small is better - the design concepts explored with the Mini Sculpture Project serves as a prototyping study for incorporating motion control in the larger Full Sculpture Project. Details on the Mini Sculpture Design are also given in the handouts section for the Mini Sculpture Project.
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