Week 16

My final project is "Robot 007" - my seventh robot for Eurobot - International Robotics Cup for Youth. The contest was founded in 1998, in France. This year Eurobot final involves over 250 teams from all around the world. Teams from Canada, Mexico, most European countries, Russia, Malasiya, Thailand are in the cup. By participating in this contest team members earn huge experience in electronics, mechanics and programming.

The robot should perform several tasks, defined by rules in a play with opponent's robot. The robot which have done more tasks wins. 16 teams in the top are passing to the final. The best robot is passing to first rank through the final by winning and eliminating his opponents.

The set of tasks are updated every year according to the season's theme. Some of the things are constant. Robots work on a playground with size of 2*3 meters. Recent themes were: "Robots play golf", "Gold Rush", "Mission to Mars", "Temples of Atlantis", "Feed the World", "Chess up" and "Treasure Island". Current theme is - happy birthday.

Eurobot robots are usually built out of wood or plastic, using DC or stepper motors, microcontrollers or even computers in them. My robot is designed to be built out of acrylic and ABS/PLA plastic. I use Maxon Motors (Switzerland) DC drives for the chassis, Hitec, TowerPro servos, Sparkfun DC motors for the mechanics. Robot's electronics is build around a RaspberryPi (for machine vision with OpenCV) - I also have 2 boards - STM32 based robot controller which I designed in Eagle CAD, ATmega328 boards for the sensors. All the coding is done with plain C or Arduino's C++.

I bought all the parts, some of them were supplied by sponsors. I tried to make as much parts as I can at FabLab - plates, mechanics, tires, ergonomic and design parts, PCBs (some of them couldn't be made at FabLab so I ordered them on a local factory).

The full cost of the robot (including sponsored parts) is over $2000.

I used 3d printing, laser cutting, vinyl cutting, CNC milling, molding processes to build the robot. I had to build the robot before 7th may - the opening of Eurobot final. Rules for this season were published in September 2012. Now, the 7th May, I got to 6th in the top by winning games with opponents from Austria and Germany. Of course final will change everything =)