Team 301:FAMU-FSU Southeast Con Hardware Competition Team

Abstract

The IEEE SoutheastCon Student Hardware Competition is a yearly robotic design contest. This year’s game is to design an autonomous robot to do at least 1 of 2 tasks, within 3 minutes. The 1st game is to use 10 push buttons that are along one of the walls of the field to type as many digits (0-9) of the number PI (3.14159...) as possible. The 2nd game is to stack Lego Duplo blocks of different colors in order, within the scoring area. There are 10 different block colors distributed around the field and each color represents a different digit (0-9). The goal is to stack as many blocks as possible in the order of PI. Our goal is to compete in the 2nd game in stacking as many blocks as we can. Our robot follows a painted, lined route using infrared sensors and line-following software to reach the Duplo blocks. It then gathers and stacks them as it goes around the field using sonar and infrared sensors. The robot carries the Duplo blocks by having two claws, one on the bottom and one on the top. The claw at the bottom lines up the Duplo blocks so the top claw can pick it up with no problems. Then the top claw moves up and holds the Duplo block in place so it can stack with the new incoming Duplo block. Toward the end of the 3-minute time limit, the robot moves over to the goal to place the stack of Duplo blocks.