Mechatronic Robot Project

(READ THIS BEFORE PLAYING ANY VIDEOS!!!!)
Well, the semester is winding down, with lovely finals next week. But today, my group and I finished the first half of our robot project. Just as a little background, the project is a horse and chariot theme. This means our robot had to use LEGS to walk (no wheels). This was a very challenging aspect of the design because it involved some complex, four-bar linkages as you will see in this video...

So, the goal this semester was to simply walk 8 feet in a straight line. Sounds easy enough. It wasn't. But we did it! Today, at about 1:30, we submitted our robot to be graded. Here is the video of the submission. Before you watch, you must note that the robot is running on very LOW battery and at only 40% power. We didn't want to run at full power because of several reasons, but I won't bore you with those. Anyway, check it out... (no audio for some reason)

So that was it, we got full credit. However, they are timing how long it takes, and there will be a winner. So, they are going to let us go back with FULL battery and let us try again, see if we can get a better time (that first try was about 40 seconds).

For next semester, the robot must race with other robots on a figure 8 track!!! That will be hard. So all of next semester, we will be mounting stuff like Infrared Sensors and Sonar Sensors to the hull and steer our robot along the track. Not to sure how we will do that, but hopefully we'll learn how to!

It is quite the feeling to see something you have worked so hard on, that is so complex, actually work. Today was a good day! Thanks for reading.