Soren Sabet Sarvestany

      In my AER201 course, my team and I were challenged with building an autonomous robot to play a modified game of connect four. I was the electromechanical team member, building all mechanical components on the robot and assisting the circuits team member. My teammates were Prabu Karthick Parameshwar and Pavel Litvinovich. 

 

      Ping pong balls were located inside 4 hoppers on the playing field (see videos and pictures below). The hoppers at each corner were fixed, and contained 4 balls each. The hoppers in the center contained 7 balls each and were assigned a random position based on a set of constraints provided to students beforehand. The locatio of these hoppers for a particular game was revealed 3 minutes before the start of each match. Teams were not permitted to reprogram their arduinos in this 3 minute interval, but could input data using onboard methods. Games ran for 7 minutes, with the team scoring the most points winning. Connect fours would score more points.   

 

      Project Constraints

            • The robot must not weigh more than 3 kg

            • The total cost of all components on the robot must not exceed $250.00 CAD
            • The robot must start within a 40 cm x 40 cm x 40cm box on the gameboard

            • At no point in the game should any part of one team's robot cross over to the other side of the playing

              field

            • The robot must not damage or alter the gameboard

            • The robot can only manipulate one ball at a time

            • The robot cannot obstruct the connect four columns

            • The robot cannot interfere with the other team's robot.

            • The robot must be provided onboard power

            • The robot must be autonomously controlled

            
      Below, you will find pictures of our final robot, and videos of the four games we played. Afterwards, you can find a detailed breakdown of all the steps that went into this project. The full copy of my engineering notebook for this project can be found here. 

 

      Although our robot had no sensors and was not able to drive in a straight line (due to limited tools available to drill holes), we were able to get around this problem by bumping into walls to aling ourselves (See first video, match # 3). 

 

Also, during this project, I individually and voluntarily coordinated, managed, sorted, and delivered a group order of $378.14 from digikey.com for 14 teams to reduce costs, saving $44.60 overall. The original quote and the final price can be found here and here respectively.