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Shown here is the robot which our team of four built for an annual robotics competition. This year’s (2007) challenge was to have autonomous robots play a modified version of the board game “Operation.” Eight steel organs were placed in plastic containers mounted with accelerometers to alert if an organ had been picked up ungently. All organs were to be removed from the containers and placed elsewhere on the table except one of the two eyes which would be randomly selected to output a 1kHz beacon of infrared light while the other would output a 10kHz signal.
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Our team won the competition, taking home four expensive Fluke multimeters.
Our approach to removed the organs from the containers was to lower an electromagnet down with a lead-screw system until it touched an organ, then pass current through the coils in the magnet. Following this the lead-gscrew system lifts the magnet and attached piece, rotates a base and stops the current flow through the magnet; thus, dropping the piece.
The lead-screw system with rotating base attached. This design was inspired by the lead-screw design used to build my CNC machine.
I was in charge of all the mechanical aspects of the project as well as coordination of the group.
The electromagnet mounted on a 3 axis adjustable arm allowed the fixed coordinates to be easily altered.
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