The life of a Mechanical Engineer: Part 2

A handful of weeks back I told you about the projects going on in my Creative Design class this fall. Back then, I was just starting to learn about the design process and had barely gotten my feet wet in lab. Now, I'm right in the middle of one of the most critical weeks in the class.

Unlike all of my other classes at Tech, ME 2110 has a strange schedule--that is, the official end of the class is in the middle of November, a whole month earlier than the rest. I didn't understand why a month or two ago, but now it's clear--this scheduling offset is critical, otherwise I wouldn't be able to sleep! Let me explain:

November 12th is the class-wide competition between each team's final project. This semester's goal is to build a robot that represents a fire, search, and rescue autonomous ground vehicle. The competition arena is a square with one robot per side. To score points, the robot must drop "smoke jumpers" (squash balls) into the rotating holes in the top of the rotating rescue zone, rescue a "hiker" (bowling pin) by taking it back to the starting zone, deploy "fire breaks" (the black canisters at the edges of each section), and deploy the "Aerial fire break" once the robot has made it back into the starting zone. To top it all off, the rotating rescue zone has a sensor that can detect the robot if it doesn't grab the hiker and withdraw quick enough. If the robot is detected, dice are put into the zone, subtracting from your overall score. To win, the robot has to out-score the opponents for roughly 12 consecutive rounds.

While the competition is three weeks away, the first testing round is on Thursday--so we need a constructed robot that is working in less than a week! I've been meeting with my team members every day since Fall break ended for hours each day.

Tuesday and Wednesday, we took our concepts generated from our morph chart, placed them in an evaluation matrix, and came up with the final concept. Early Thursday morning we made our first trip to Home Depot (we've since become friends with the cashiers!!) and started construction during lab in the afternoon (~5 hours total on Thursday). Friday after a quick bite to eat and another run to Home Depot, we spent the afternoon figuring out how to mount the wheel assembly to our drawer slider assembly (~4 hours).

The robot at the end of Friday

As we need a working robot by Thursday, today (Saturday) was the day to get as much as possible done. We started out the day at 9am, and then spent two hours driving to Home Depot and multiple Ace Hardware stores (not many people carry metric couplers!), then mounted the wheel assembly (it had been drying overnight), and put in a third set of drawer sliders that were part of the assembly for grabbing the bowling pin. A platform was mounted onto the final set of sliders, and a pneumatic pump placed so it can quickly push the platform towards the rescue zone, grab the hiker, and withdraw before it is detected.

At 4pm on Saturday

At 4pm, we took our first break since 9am to eat. Time flies when you're having fun! After a few hour break, we were back at it--for another three hours. As of 11pm tonight, we had the grabbing mechanism done and functional! After 11 hours of work today, we've made huge amounts of progress. A few more hours on Sunday and we'll be nearing completion of construction--with only testing and coding to complete!


Update: Here's a quick update from Sunday night's progress after another 7 hours of work!

Sunday at 8:30pm

More to come!

-Joshua