T-Shirt Cannon Robot

What better way is there to promote our robotics team and our engineering school than to use a robot to shoot t-shirts into the crowd at promotional events? This robot is being designed exactly for that purpose: promoting the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Design began Fall of 2020, but construction was delayed due to a pandemic and all that jazz. Construction began Fall of 2021 where a prototype cannon was designed and constructed for testing effectiveness of the design

IGVC

The main objective with this competition is to build a robot that can autonomously navigate around a course staying in-between white lines and avoiding obstacles in its path. You can visit the competition website here: IGVC How We Did We won 4th in the design portion of the competition. We also won the rookie of the year award. Our design report can be found below in the links section. Software Th

Spinnybot

This robot was constructed to compete in the Combat Robot event at the 2020 NRC competition. The goal of this competition is to construct a 14" x 14" x 14" 3lb beetleweight robot. Two robots fight head-to-head in an enclosed 8’x8’ arena until one of the bots becomes immobilized. The robot we designed for this was a full-body spinning robot. It is circular and the entire robot is designed to spin at approximately 500rpm. The primary weapon is a tooth sticking out of the side to hit the other r

AVC Car

This bot was built and programmed for competing in the National Robotics Challenge (NRC) Autonomous Vehicle Competition (AVC). The purpose of this competition is to build and program a self-driving car that will navigate a course in the shortest time possible. Points are awarded for speed and also for successfully navigating through obstacles. Mechanical This robot was built on an old Traxxas RC car chassis that we had from a previous competition. This chassis

Controller v2

Redesign of the previous controller. The goal of this version was to fix some of the issues with the previous version while adding some new features. Some of the improvements include: better battery life, integrated battery charger, more ergonomic case, and triggers and bumpers. The controller was initialy designed during the 2018-2019 season for use with B.A.M. in the ASME Student Design competition, but there were some unforseen issues with the PCB which weren't able to be solved proir to c

B.A.M.

B.A.M. (Ball Acquisition Machine) is a robot constructed for the 2019 ASME Student Design Competition. The goal of the competition was to collect balls of various sizes from 20cm tall tubes and dispense them into a 50cm x 50cm scoring area. Mechanical The original design was as follows. A basket on the side of the robot would be used

Swervebot

Swervebot is a drivetrain idea we had for the 2019 ASME Student Design Competition. Its main feature is a differential swerve drive system for omnidirectional motion. A standard swerve drive robot works by rotating wheels about their vertical axis so that they face in the direction the robot needs to move. This differential swerve drive design is more efficient since it does not require an additional motor for rotating the wheels (both motors are used for driving the robot). Each whee

Soccerbots

Robots created to compete in the 2018 ASME Student Design Competition. For this competition, we created three bots: two for defense and one for offense. The three robots were designed to fit together inside of an 18” cube to meet the size requirements in the rules. Shooterbot Shooterbot is the offensive bot. It features a tennis ball shooter capable of launching a tennis ball approximately 40ft when set to “kill mode”. It also has a mecanum drivetrain for maneuve

Controller

Custom controller developed for use with the soccorbots for the 2018 ASME SDC. Even though the controller was designed for this purpose, the primary goal was to create a controller that could easily be used with any of our robots in the future. Designing it ourselves would give us complete control of how the controller behaves and sends information to the robot. The controller used an ATMEGA328P as the controller and an XBee-Pro 900hp for communications. Power was supplied from a 9V ba

Surface Mobility Platform and Mecanumbot

The SMPs and Mecanumbot were developed for three primary uses: Learning and research Functional examples Demos The Surface Mobility Platform (SMP) is based on an all terrain chassis developed by Gears Educational Systems. The design incorporates independent suspension for the left and right sides of the robot. This chassis was modified by adding the silver motor-housings and beefier motors for more power. The Mecanum frame was buit by a sen