Building
On our robot we...
- Use gears for torque (rotational force) Having a little gear with a small amount of teeth connect to a big gear with a lot of teeth gives us more rotational force. Having a big gear connect to a small gear increases speed. We wanted our attachments to come down with a lot of force, so we have a gear with 24 teeth connect to a gear with 40 teeth, giving us added torque, and a gear ratio of 3/5.
- Use gears to change direction. We use the black butterfly gears to make our arm spin not vertically, but around horizontally. This enables us to have our attachments swing out, not down.
- Use Sensors. We use a total of five sensors on our robot. We have three motors (called rotation sensors), a color sensor, and a light sensor. We use the light sensor to find the black lines all over the field, so we know where we are on the field. We also use a one sensor line follower with the light sensor, and a two sensor line follower with the color and light sensor working together. We use the rotation sensors to tell when we have gone to far while trying to find a black line on the mat so our robot can self correct and to know when to stop our line follower.
- Use a jig for alignment. To make sure we line up our robot the same way all of the time, we use a jig. It fits perfectly in base, and has spaces carved out that the robot fits in.
- Shield sensors. We shielded our sensors by putting LEGOs around and above them. Shielding sensors makes sure that there is no light going underneath the sensors and messing up their readings.
Cad modeling
- We used free software called Lego Digital Designer to CAD Model our robots and attachments. CAD stands for Computer Aided Design. We used many of LEGO's computerized pieces to construct a copy of both of our robots and all of our attachments. Although there are some LEGO pieces missing from the software (like large white wheels, certain beams, and colors), we were able to model almost all of our robot. With new updates to the Digital Designer, come more pieces.