Week 12: Machine Building

*Rendered model of the main machine body.

The Idea

Two weeks before the machine building week, one of my groupmates Mariam and I had thought about making a robot vacuum cleaner. Then when the week had arrived, we changed our initial idea and spent a day ideating. After many ideas, and a lot of back and forth, eventually, we landed on the idea of a two-wheeled self balancing robot. Whereas the inspiration came from both bionic robots and agentic AI.

Please find the complete group assignment here.

The Philosophy

My team mates and instructors know that before conquering bionic robots and agentic AI, we first need to solve mobility tasks. In other words, if the end goal is building robots that move and think on their own, then movement has to come first. Rather than starting with something straightforward, we figured we would pick a problem that’s already a bit harder than it required to be. A self-balancing robot has to earn its stability constantly, it’s not just rolling from one point to point another, it’s working continuously to stay upright –– in some sence a 2-in-1 task. It felt true to the bigger picture we had in mind, but the grand idea behind was learning by failing.

Project Ditribution

The work was devided between three people – Mariam, Saad, and Hrach [me]. Aditionally we were continuously supervised by Onik, one of our local instructors.

The Design

We began by each submitiing a draft of what the robot would look like, and after idating a day, we landed on the sketches below.

The Components

To make a self balancing robot you need:

1x chassis
2x rims
2x tyres
2x DC motors

1x ESP32-C3 for mobility
1x ESP32-S3 for camera input

1x LCD
1x camera
1x Wi-Fi antena

1x infinate patience

Wheels

Everything began from a single rim and a tyre. The rim was simple, printed with black PLA. Whereas for the tyre, initally, we wanted to print it with transparent TPU. The first round did not go as planned. Assuming the nozzle was clogged, so we tried cleaning it. The needle did not work so we tried some other methods, such as heating the nozzle, and retracting the fillament by pulling with a quick movement. Nonetheless, while it seems to be a common characteristics for TPUs, the fillament was retracting deformed like a spiraled pasta. We also considered drying the fillament, but that did not seem to work either.

Eventually, we came to a conclusion that the fault was with the fillament. So we switched to a opaque silver metallic TPU.

Adapting to changes, testing, and producing new prototypes.

The final 3D model looked like like this.

Chassis

Inner Structure

Camera

Charger

Obstacles

Future Developement

Conclusion

It was more than I had imagined! I got to experiment a lot with Fusion 360, and one of the biggest achievements of the week was the improvement of CAD software. Choosing a task that is complex in its nature not only made me more exited about my final project, it also forces me to come up with a task equal or harder than the one we built for this project

Resources

Source files:

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Prompts

No prompts were used to come up with the design of this project!