Kinetic Sculptures of Tracks

Our Team

Tracks is a four-member group with Christina, Felicia, Julianne, and Remon from COSMOS Cluster 2, Design and Control of Kinetic Sculptures. The team decided on their name after building a series of tracks for their mini sculpture design. Each person on the team helps the others out, but that doesn't mean we don't have our main responsibilities to handle. Christina is the sculpture builder, she ensures that the overall structure of the design is finished & built. Felicia is the coder; she works with RobotC and any other necessary apps to help build code for our motors and sensors. Julianne designs the WM2D online models that help simulate our kinetic sculpture to see whether they'll work or not. Remon secures motors and sensors to the sculpture with Lego and LaserCAMM acrylic pieces.

Kinetic Sculptures

Our team members learned how to design, analyze, fabricate and control several kinetic sculptures! The kinetic sculptures include individual Pendulum Clocks, a controlled Mini Sculpture and an automated Full Sculpture created by our team.

Design was facilitated with Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools implemented in Fusion and AutoCAD.
Analysis of the dynamics of movement of the sculptures is based on fundamental physics with the mathematical description of motion covered in lectures and simulations facilitated by Working Model 2D (WM2D).
Fabrication is done both manually in the Dept. of MAE Design Studio and automated with Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) tools provided by the LaserCAMM and optional 3D printing, initiated by a Clock Project.
Additional motion control is added to our kinetic sculptures by using Lego NXT sensors, including our specially designed COSMOS ball speed sensor, NXT motors and programming an NXT using RobotC.

Our team webpage gives a summary of both our individual and team effort to make our kinetic sculptures work as designed!

Accomplishments

After we had built our mini sculpture, we decided that the most important outcomes had to do with the complexity of our sculpture. Because our sculpture was extremely narrow, we had very tight and complex tracks. We created 3 different tracks that can run parallel to each other to add to the complexity of the sculpture.

We accomplished adding two motors and three sensors to allow for two user inputs and a sensor-activated motor.

With a successful mini sculpture, we were able to smoothly add parts to create the full sculpture.

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