<aside> 🎓 Skills Learned:
In November 2020, I participated in the Carleton Engineering Competition 2020 with an interdisciplinary team comprised of myself and two other engineering students. The challenge of the competition was to prototype an Arduino robot that would deliver one ping-pong ball to specified target spaces and not lose nor miss the target. The robot would have to be loaded at the start and stop moving at the “warehouse", but could not be interacted with by any team member between start and finish. We could only use the limited materials they provided us and everything needed to be completed in 6 hours.
My responsibility was the ball delivery mechanism. I broke it down into two objectives: first, I need a way to launch the ball without assistance, and second, I needed to figure out a way to prevent the ping pong balls from rolling off the terrain. To tackle the first problem, I decided to build a ramp. The balls would fall forward with the help of gravity but only be propelled when the servo motor propelled them outwards. I coordinated with my teammate in charge of the code so we could perfectly time when the servo should launch the balls.
Then for the second problem, I wrapped pipe cleaners around the ping pong balls to prevent them from rolling away. My thought process was that to stop the rolling, either I had to increase the friction or make one side of the ping pong ball heavier so it automatically stays on that heavy side. I went with both and you can see the robot at work in the video above.
