Tamiya Robot

The Tamiya Robot was the most complicated bot we made. To start we made the circuit for the bot. We used a template in the instructions book to make this circuit, however it was fairly difficult and required troubleshooting to ensure that all was correct.

Below is an image of the Arduino circuit made in Tinkercad.

Here is an image of the Arduino circuit made in Tinkercad.

Next we attempted to make the physical robot. We had to change the motors used, which led to many difficulties. First of all, we had to rebuild the motor 5 times. The motor has a lot of really small parts that were difficult to properly align. This was just the first in a series of difficulties that we faced. The next was in getting the circuit attached to the Tamiya model. It was challenging using tape and cardboard to create a strong structure and keep everyting attached. Finally, we continued having issues with the Ultrasonic sensor and its motion.

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Here is a video of our practice sensor robot on the table. This robot showed us that our code worked and that the robot could move forward, but the sensors were not as reliable. The sensor is meant to detect any object within 10 cm from the robot and input a command to turn the robot; however, it frequently detected the wires on the Arduino or randomly detected things closeby.

To the right is to the design process of building the final robot. We built a cardboard box box out of hot glue and stuck it to the main frame. We then placed the circuitboard on top of the cardboard box.

Here is the final design of the robot. The gears and motors are below the cardboard box and circuitboard. On either side the wheels are lined with tracks. On top, the sensor is connected to the motors/gears while the circuit controlling the bot movement is connected to the batteries. The two different circuitboards are connected to each other, so everything is connected.

To the right is a video of our wheels spinning! This worked with the sensor for a brief period of time, but some wires fell out which left us to struggle to piece them back to their intended positions. The other video shows the bot moving, however the sensors were not working as intended. Soon, our tracks fell apart because of the instability of the robot.

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Reflection: At the end of the day, this robot never fully worked. This was because all the elements of the robot never worked together at the same time. First of all, we had a lot of trouble building the gears/motor. We rebuilt this element multiple times after some parts were missing or the alignment was off. This took up a lot of time and left the remaining building of the robot to occur in too short of a time period. In the future, we will work slower and ensure we are building our models correctly. Furthermore, the wires connecting the batteries to the circuits continuously fell out, no matter how much tape we used. Also, the sensor was very sensitive and regularly acted strangely. This could have been due to its sensitivity or some missteps in our code: it is slightly unclear because at times the sensor seemed to work but at times it did not. Finally, our robot was not very strongly built. We only used hot glue late in the design process, so the structure was very strong. This was mainly because of the time constraint we faced due to the gears/motor, so in the future we need to focus on time management.

Tamiya Code:

Tamiya Code

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