This past semester, I was enrolled in Mechanical Design. The goal of the course was to design, manufacture, code, and demo a search and rescue robot. The robot needed to pick up a medicine kit, drive through an obstacle course in RC mode, and then autonomously climb over a foot-high wall composed of two steps, drive through a chute without hitting the walls, search and drive toward a light, and then deposit the med kit in a receptacle.

I was co-leader of the group and was responsible for the electronics and coding portion of the project. Rocky has two large drive wheels and two triangle-shaped lobe wheels for climbing the wall, along with a passive gripper for lifting up the med kit. Rocky was coded in Arduino and used a Teensyduino 3.0 microcontroller. We used four proximity sensors and two light sensors to determine Rocky’s location for the various tasks.

On the day of demonstration, Rocky worked like a charm and completed the tasks on the first try. Building this robot taught me about leadership, time management, and of course, how to build a robot. This project solidified my desire to be a project manager.

You can view the final design report here.

~Annie