dancing robot

The goal of the competition is to build a robot which can dance with music. The robot has a self-designed mechanical structure driven by digital servos. The music is pre-prepared so the actions of the robot is fixed. This is the second project I was involved after the smart racing car competition. Similar to all the robotic system, the development of dancing robots includes three parts, which are mechanical design, electronic design, and finally software design. The mechanical design part provide every team a chance to define their own dancing robot. The idea of our team came from a member Qi. He would like to design a robot which could be transformed between a hand shape and a dog shape.

The robot in the hand shape is:

The robot in the dog shape is:

Besides to the mechanical design, we also need to design the PCB board for the system. Luckily, as our team has participated in this competition for many years, we have quite stable PCB board to power and drive up to 24 servos. But at that time, all the servos we used are analog servos which are not precise enough for some high challenge motions. To upgrade to digital servos, all the PCB and software should be upgraded. For this time of competition, we did not make such large upgrade. All the upgrade was made one year later.

Our team also participated into search and rescue robot competition. It is still a quite challenge mission at the year of 2011. The ground robot will enter an unknown environment and conduct SLAM mission. Although the vehicle could be operated remotely by WiFi network, it still need to finish some quite hard tasks such as clime stairs.

After nearly a week of competition, we have won many prizes in both dancing and search/rescue robot group. This is my first time to take part in a national competition and I found it quite challenge but interesting. I need to finish regular courses and homework on time, and still need to spent extra time on these competitions. But the hand-on work like this really arouse my interests as an engineering student. These competitions provide us with good opportunity to build some real machines which may help to solve some practical problems in the future.