Junior Soccer Robocup Project
In this series of posts called Junior Soccer Robocup Project I’ll be talking about how I created my 2 autonomous robots that I used to participate in Junior Soccer Robocup in 2016.
So the goal of this competition is to have a team of 1 to 2 robots working together (or not) in order to score goals on the enemy robot team. The robots must be completely autonomous and can’t have any type of communication with the “outside”, they are only allowed to communicate between themselves.
Now that you know the rules I’ll explain why I made this project and what did I need to be able to complete it. Here you have the rules for the junior soccer robocup of 2016.
Purpose:
I was in the 3rd (12º grade) studying Electronic and Telecommunications at that time and I had to come up with a project that covered a little bit about everything we did throughout the 3 years. I had had participated in the previously robocups, 2014 and 2015, participating in Junior Dance Robocup and Junior Rescue Robocup respectively (which I’ll probably make some other posts about them later on), so for my third and final year I decided to take a step higher and head for the hardest competition on robocup, soccer. I’ve always been a good programmer and I felt like what I was doing wasn’t enough and that I wanted to learn more and more so the whole thing was more of a challenge to myself instead of a project to present.
What did I use to accomplish this project:
First of all, money. Every sensor, microcontroller, 3D part, board, resistor, capacitator, wheel, lcd, cable, etc.. cost money, some of them reaching beyond £100 as for example the ultrasonic sensors SRF10 which I had 4 in each robot.
I managed to get a sponsor called Aliatron, an electronics manufacturer company which provided me with everything I needed in order to finish my project.
Back to what’s important, let’s start from the bottom shall we? To make the bases for the robot (which are made from aluminium), I used a CNC machine to cut an aluminium squared sheet (I’ll have a video of it later on), which after being done I glued it to a PVC base with the same shape to add extra resistance to the base. Why is it important to be resistant? You may ask. The answer is, these robots in competition collide a lot, specially with the enemy team and not to talk about their speed which can be quite fast! So basically having a strong base is a must in what comes to building these robots.
To be continued...
