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Chicken Dinner

Many chickens trying to make dinner

We are a group of MIT Solar Car chickens (or vegetables) creating a robot over IAP while we're not at shop. Our members consist of:

Chicken #1: Quang Kieu (2020)

Hi my name is Quang and I'm in Solar Car.

Chicken #2: Hoang Huynh (2022)

Hi my name is Hoang and I'm in Solar Car.

Chicken #3: Stephanie Hoo (2022)

Hi my name is Stephanie and I'm in Solar Car.

Chicken #4: Annemarie Dapoz (2022)

Hi my name is Annemarie and I'm in Solar Car.

Chicken #5: Shan Shan Huang (2022)

Hi my name is Shan Shan and I'm in Solar Car.

THE CONCEPTION AND CREATION OF SQUAWK: A TIMELINE

Week 1: Ideas and Testbot

To create Squawk, a final robot, Chirp, a test robot, must be first created. Basically we just needed a shell of a robot for the software people to test on, especially because we deided early on that we wanted to use mecanum wheels.

We basically just used the DXF files that the MASLAB staff gave us for the motor mounts but made our own fake bases so we could have electronics and have four wheels instead of two. Tfw the MASLAB team's CAD files were all made in SolidWorks 2019 and we're on SolidWorks 2018 :))))) oof

Once the software people had a shell of a robot to play with, the course 2's began to think of new revolutionary designs for their own chicken robot!

Initial plan: pick up cylinders from the dispenser all at once with fingers and deposit them onto pegs!

MASLAB Staff: lol sike -changes dispenser design-

Our team: -sad chicken noises-

After looking at the point break downs, we decided to go for the most points and do floor to cyilnder, and not think about the dispenser at all.

We came up with a lot of random ideas, like

  • Individually actuated fingers to adapt to the new dispenser
  • A spinning scooper to grab the cylinders from the side of the dispenser
  • Pushing cylinders off fingers with some sort of linear actuator
  • A dipping rack of cylinders

We eventually settled on a floor intake under the bot that picked up cylinders that we ran over, funneling them up a ramp and color sorting them to either side of the robot by color onto racks that deposited them five at a time to the pegs.

Week 2: Meche Mess, EE's Great

Software/EE people are doing a great job getting the controls of the testbot working well and getting the lidar to sense the walls and track the April Tags

Mech E people busy (trying) the idea out, working out small details and CAD-ing the design up before the design review.

Is SolidWorks great? Is Fusion better? Who knows, everything is on fire and we're doing our best running around like chickens with their heads cut off! :))))) SolidWorks is angery and we have no human sacrifice to appease the CAD gods.

January 15th: Design Review Day

Our team: -explains our overcomplicated ideas-

MASLAB staff: -explains very valid reasons why we SHOULDN'T do it-

Our team: -sadder chicken noises-

Back to square one! Time to rethink an entirely new strategy with a simpler design and try to maximize the our minimum points vs. maximizing max points.

We decide it's just better for us to just go for dispenser to pegs and floor to floor since we wouldn't have to move anything upwards. Over the next couple of days we threw around ideas we had in the beginning of the month and came up with new ideas.

Main ideas:

  • Spinner to collect from the dispenser and have the cylinders roll into racks that would deposit them onto pegs
  • Individual actuated finger
  • LEAVE COLOR SORTING FOR LATER (if ever)

But here's a cute pic of our software/ee people

Week 3: Meche Mess, EE's Great: a sequel

We settled on a design that would in theory intake cylinders with compliant wheels (horizontally) that directly pushed them into a rack that can move side to side and also drop down to place on pegs.

Basically we did a lot of CAD (and a lot of it broke oof)

no, we didn't finish the mechanical design by the end of this week either :')

Week 4: Meche Mess, EE's Great: the trilogy

We finished CAD (mostly) over the weekend and lasercut our MDF not at EDS. On weekdays though, we assembled parts (some which only arrived on Tuesday) and made jank fixes once we got to test out how our design worked in real life.

-stressed chicken noises-

But our robot started to look more and more like a real robot!

Testing mechanical systems too!

Sorry @software/ee team for not giving enough time to thorougly test and play with things