Ideas Ideas Ideas, and students from Belgium

The Idea phase, the phase where things start to take shape.
In a time span of 2 weeks it was our job to take all information and vague ideas, and build them into integral ideas, 3 to be exact. The second week we were going to be assisted by students from EPO Belgium for the sub-system movement, so we used the first week to gather our toughs and form ideas for the other 4 sub-systems. The second week we used to create ideas for moving around, and integrating the different sub-systems into 3 integral ideas.

All these ideas formed around our design vision:
We see this assignment as a competition we should win, so we can distinguish ourselves and our project from the other competitors. In this competition the speed in witch the whole track is completed is all that matters, the design and functionality is of no importance. Because these points are of importance to our educational program our aim is to expand our product beyond the scope of the competition.

Here is a link to the full report in Dutch.

The first step toward integral ideas is clustering the sub-system ideas in a so called morphologic overview.

 After this has been done, we went on with the integral ideas.

Integral idea 1:

This idea is based on mechanical reliability, the basis consists of 2 powered wheels for movement and steering, with 2 swiveling wheels at the back. The line detection happens at the front of the robot, where the wheels can instantly change the direction of movement if needed. For the actions pick and place we came up with the idea of a rather big cylinder with air cushions inside. To pick the bottle up the process is as follows: straight from the start the scissor lift goes to maximum height  and the arm with cylinder moves 90 degrees to the left (position of point A). When the robot arrives at point A, the robot stops at the point, and start lowering the arm until the sensors in the cylinder confirm the cylinder is placed over the bottle. Then the next step is to inflate the cushions and get a firm grip over the bottle. Then the robot returns the arm to the point B position, 90 degrees to the right and at maximum height, to follow these same steps again and put the bottle down.

Integral idea 2:

This idea is based on precision, for the wheel basis we chose an idea based of the fork lift. 2 wheels in front that carry the weight, and a 3rd wheel to form a balanced triangle. To keep the "hand" in height adjustable we came up with the idea of a jack-screw, this is a very precise mechanism also used for milling cutters. The hand itself consists of 2 bottle shaped claws that will be placed over the bottle to hold it in a firm grip. For this the claws have to be positioned very precise tough... The combination of these principles make for a robot with mm precision, but this will hurt the operating speed of the robot.

Integral idea 3:

The 3rd idea is based on automated mechanics, the wheelbases is based of the shovel. It can be powered on 4 wheels since we use the middle part to steer. This is a bit tricky tough since you don't want to deviate the robot by steering. For this idea we did not want to lift the upper half of the robot to be able to adjust the height of the hand, so we came up with an idea based of the human arm. Even tough the momentum on some of the joints will be very high, this does speed up the process of adjusting to a different height. The hand in this idea is a bottle mold, with a movable bottom part. To pick the bottle up the upper half of the body can turn 90 degrees eight er left or right, place the mold over the bottle, and move the bottom part into place for a firm grip. This idea is based on the maximum efficiency we could harness, it requires all the precision we can bring to the table with sensors and algorithms, to deliver probably the most universal approach to the problem.

When we had the integral ideas present, it was time to chose one... for this we discussed a lot with our counseling teacher, and made a little diagram to oversee the pro's and con's of each idea.


Idea one scored best in almost all respects, its quick, simple, reliable, and construct able by a bunch of students. In order to prove our ideas, we constructed a couple of simple pieces as proof of concept.

Now that we know what we are going to build, its time to fill in the details... The concept phase arrives!