BOOM v2 was a collaboration with Yamaan Atiq and Zac Capel (the same group members/housemates as for the Original BOOM) for Cube Craze, the final competition of MAE 3780, Mechatronics. BOOM v2 was designed in SolidWorks, programmed with registers in C, and manufactured using the Cornell RPL‘s laser cutter.

Cube Craze involves two small autonomous robots facing off against each other on opposite sides of a field, with the objective of having less cubes left on your starting side at the end of each 1 minute match (either by clearing the off the board or onto the opposing side). At a high level, BOOM v2 was designed to combine a block clearing strategy with a robot seeking/disabling strategy–a callback to Mechatronics’ old Sumo Bots competition. By sweeping across the field, depositing a number of blocks on the opposing side, BOOM v2 would win matches by taking an early advantage then preventing the other robot from dealing with the blocks.

Ultimately, BOOM v2 functioned well mechanically, electrically, and algorithmically, with its geared arm system quickly deploying and stowing block pushing arms during different stages of the competition and a well documented wiring system allowing for rapid dis- and re-assembly of the electrical system during testing. Additionally, the well documented electrical system allowed our code to include a wide variety of subfunctions controlling specific robot actions, so our high-level logic was written as a collection of descriptive subfunction calls versus a mass of register manipulation. Unfortunately, though the code’s logic was sound, the data received from our sonar sensors for tracking the other robot proved unreliable a large percent of the time so our robot had to often fall back on a secondary purely block-clearing strategy.

Documentation of BOOM v2 available here, CAD files available here, and competition version of the C code available here.  (CAD and code repositories will be set to private between mid October and early December)