For my senior design capstone project at The University of Akron my team and I decided we wanted to design a build the first fully autonomous combat robot to compete in the heavy weight class at RoboGames. This was a monumental undertaking that we all underestimated and required many energy drink fueled all nighters to complete.
The autonomous operation was accomplished by measured proximity data from 8 Lidar sensors, one on each face edge of the main octagon structure of the chassis. A window was cut into the weapon system what allowed the Lidars to take measurements as the weapon revolved. The measured data was then passed into a neural network development in Matlab that was trained to output the telemetry of the robot in the arena, the location of the enemy robot if detected.
The weapon system consisted of a rotating cylinder that encompassed the entire robot and two large hammer-like wings that extended beyond the rotating cylinder. The weapon system was driven by an Agni 95R on a separate electrical system running at 72V volts.
As part of the capstone project we were required to provide a report on the project detailing the engineering design process and development of the project.
Below is a video put together highlighting some the technical performance aspects of the design and early testing.
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