DIC's Terrace Farming Robot
Gold Winning Robot
MAKING OF AAROHI
A team of 15 members was selected from amongst the 100+ applications received to be part of 8th Inter IIT Terrace Farming contingent. I was grateful to be selected in teams for Mechanical Design, Planning and Controls. The initial phase saw rigorous brainstorming with meetings 3+ hours a day until the stair climbing mechanism was finalized. We then got divided into 3 teams
Manufacturing
Embedded
Planning and Controls
Manufacturing
The main role of the manufacturing team was to build the robot as per the CAD design. We were granted access to the MN Faruqui Tinkering Lab which helped us a lot in manufacturing the scissor lift and other mechanisms. Aluminum extrusions were used for building a light weight Chassis. I gained a lot of information about the conventions and nomenclature of hardware.
Embedded
This robot had many things to actuate, specifically 9 Motors and 3 Linear Actuators. 1D Lidars, IMU and Camera were mounted on the robot for Accurate localization. This team worked on sensor fusion and building the embedded circuits required for the robot. The picture above shows the flow of information which was implemented using a combination of a local microprocessor and a remote server.
Planning and Controls
A task based planner has been implemented which solves the problem statement using the concepts of Finite State Machine. To handle any mechanical instabilities of the robot we deployed several closed loop control algorithms like pitch and yaw control for stable operation. The last picture shows the various steps of the perception module used to detect end of the step/terrace.
Finally after a long train journey(40hrs) and hustle to assemble the bot in time, it all came down to the 25 mins allotted to us for the presentation, 7 mins to present orally, and 18 mins for Demo. We had prepared 3 posters which 3 of us presented and finished just in time. Our Demo went really well: "The Robot could autonomously perform navigation and Climb Down operations in the Arena". Our mechanical design was extremely stable and we could perform all the activities required. The judges were impressed with the design and autonomous navigation we demonstrated. We WON.