IEEE R5 robotics competition – CSE Senior Design

Team Name

Gamma

Timeline

Fall 2021 – Spring 2022

Students

Zachary Trumbaturi
Evan Cornish
Kartikey Sharan
Paola Gonzalez
Osama Siddiqui

Abstract

The IEEE robotics competition for region 5 was a robotics competition held in Houston on March 1st of 2022. The competition revolved around building a submarine that had to complete predefined sets of tasks. Team Gamma was able to complete a robot that entered into the competition. However on the actual date of the competition there was a piece of malfunctioning hardware which ruined our round and disqualified us.

Background

IEEE runs a robotics competition every year for participating schools. The competition is split up into several regions, of which UT Arlington is a member of region 5. The competition ruleset is determined on a yearly basis approximately 8 months before the competition is set to take place. This years competition was to involve making robots that could submerge under water, perform the tasks required for round 1 and round 2, and then come back to the surface to be collected. The robots for this years competition were not autonomous. In most years robots are expected to be autonomous which significantly changed the competition and the team dynamics.

The competition had 2 rounds. The first round involved driving through a series of obstacles, picking up a trash block, and placing it in a deposit station. The second round involved collecting floating tennis balls and placing them in a deposit station. The top 4 teams from round 1 were to advance to round 2.

Project Requirements

Robot is waterproof
Battery can power robot for duration of round
Robot will have a mechanism for collecting debris
Robot will have mechanism for depositing debris
Robot will have mechanism for opening doors and pushing buttons
Robot will have movement through water
Robot can dive and return to surface
Movement mechanisms will be easy to control and precise
Robot has underwater vision capability
Robot’s weight will be kept under 25 pounds and budget under $1,000

System Overview

Our system consisted of 4 overall layers. We had a control layer consisting of a Rasberry pi 3, and a Pixhawk 3 and a generic game controller of any brand. We chose to use the PS3 game controller. A movement layer which consisted of 6 underwater thrusters connected by wires to a fusebox which was in turn connected to the Pixhawk. A debris collection layer that was connected to the pixhawk as well. Finally the visual layer was an underwater waterproof webcam connected to the Rasberry pi 3.

Results

Due to a malfunction of our Pixhawk during competition, our rightmost vertical thruster would not spin and our competition round was ruined. As a result we only collected the bonus points for staying under weight and budget. We were able to put our robot in the water and move so we were not completely disqualified.

competition_round_IEEE Download

Future Work

Future work includes redesign of the robot to not use the pixhawk hardware that consistently malfunctions. The robot needs to be designed to use arduino microcontrollers and some software needs to be written to auto balance the thrusters to keep the robot at a constant depth when submerged under the water.