We have been working on these robots for the past year! Thanks to DaKiller and Goth for their electronic help in EaglePCB..etc! We came 2nd in the Robocup Nationals last weekend and won the Innovation Award! We will be entering next year and I'll post updates on this project thread as we improve our robots. Planning to have (larger solenoid, better motors and gearboxes (maxon), accelerometers...etc). Basic overview of the robot/s (both nearly have the same hardware): - ATMega32 - I2C Ultrasonics (SRF08), Compass (CMP03) - Other ultrasonics (SRF04) - Solenoid Kicker (to kick the ball), runs on 40V (40v step-up with 10000uF capacitor) - LCD - I2C Analogue-to-Digital 8 channels each board - Omniwheels (for omnidirectional movement) Pictures in this thread: http://redgoesfaster.net/forums/showthread.php?p=779
haha cool, looks like a more complex version of my robot, that I built this year. What do you do with it?
Because they can roll freely laterally (rollers around the circumference of the wheel), the robot can move in any direction without "rotating" and do all sorts of cool movements (like strafing, frisbeeing..etc) They're like vectors, add the three vectors up to get the resultant motion Took like a year. Couldn't exactly find any other replacement for lego gears that would do the job so easily!
Oh yeah. Whoops. I should have been able to see that from just looking at the pictures. For some reason it didn't click that those little white bits roll perpendicular to the wheels. I'm an idiot.
Just to demonstrate what our 3-wheel setup can do in terms of movement, I've uploaded a video of our two robots orbiting around each other. http://redgoesfaster.net/videos/alpha.wmv
A couple of stupid questions: What uni do you represent? What was the basic spec of what the robots have to achieve, for the competition? What's the point of having a robot that isn't equipped with weapons?
Was this on the Make blog? I think I've seen those pictures before somewhere. Some nice looking robots there. I think Xassius is still at school?
Robot soccer i do believe. I helped out a bit with the finals for the Melbourne juniors so i've seen the lower end of the spectrum but never seen the more advanced robots do their thing.
I'm still in Year 11 It's in a competition called Robocup Junior. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocup_Junior Most people in the competition use lego robots, which aren't very good. But in the internationals, many people use custom robots. And for the laugh of the day - http://www.redgoesfaster.net/de/video/portugal-kick.wmv
Basically uses a ON-Semi switchmode step-up chip with a inductor charging up a big 10000uF capacitor at 40v. Then through a mosfet, the charge in the capacitor can be discharged into a solenoid, which makes the robot "kick" the ball. I should be able to get some video footage of the robots in actual gameplay today.
I'm a mate of Xassius and I've been competing in the same competition. We won the Australian Open last year but didn't place this year (we did get best goal difference though). We went to Bremen, Germany earlier this year to compete in the international competition and finished in 2nd place. Also we won the Queensland states this year (beat Xassius in semi-final but didn't get to play him at the Aus Open). Our website is http://www.dynamicequilibrium.uni.cc/. There's some info on the robots, photos from internationals, highlights videos from a couple of competitions and the code we used on both robots. Also check out http://www.robocupjunior.org.au/ for more information on RoboCup Junior.
Lego and hot-melt glue for the win!!! On a more serious note, have you considered taking your basic design, and transferring it straight over to the Lego NXT robotic system? There's a big competition running overseas to promote the new NXT.
What competition is that? I haven't played around with the NXT system, but it doesn't sound very good.
