Antdroid

I spent two weeks brainstorming and drawing solutions to the problem of designing a robot. While Antdroid was one of my original ideas, I knew that I needed to exhaust my creative mind and push out as many solutions as possible to feel comfortable with my final choice. Once I weighed my options and Antdroid was the winner, the drawing did not finish there. Building the robot in my mind and translating those ideas onto paper allowed me to make key dimension decisions early in the process. To add on, creating organic shapes and complex movement structures takes time and experimentation. Putting in the effort to draw to scale and consider exactly what I wanted my robot to resemble meant that once I started my CAD, I was just following a well laid out plan.

With biweekly presentations and a culminating journey video, I was pushed to capture video and pictures throughout the entire journey. At the start of the project, I did not know what story I would craft, but could not let that limit the media I captured. So, I got in the habit of recording anything and everything important, ensuring the quality would be high enough for my eventual video. Showcasing all of the work in a documentary was a fun and artistic way to share my robot’s journey. While my video does not showcase all of the nitty-gritty details of the robot, the artistry of the film speaks to how I wanted my robot to be beautiful and natural.

Diligent note taking was another important part of documenting. In the beginning, I would have my computer to take notes, but found this quite annoying as I couldnt take great notes when my hands were oily or covered in glue. In response, I learned how to take great notes on paper about my project and would then transcribe the notes onto an online database. While this seems trivial, taking quick diligent notes about tolerance issues, print failing because of one section, or a new idea took time to learn, especially because I would need to come back to these notes even when a large amount of time passed. Using consistent and accurate terminology, along with building a consistent note taking habit yielded a much higher level of success.

Creating all of the presentations (linked below) was a great way to summarize my thought process and extract other people’s ideas. I am glad that I did not try to make these presentations beautiful, per se, I kept them simple and too the point. However, I prioritized working on my robot’s structure than the presentations and there were a few times that I did not hit the quality mark I wanted. I was presenting to the entire class and poor resource management meant my presentations lacked high-quality depictions of my thinking or did not show the full extent of the work I had done.

With so many moving parts and thankfully, a lot of repeated parts, Antdroid advanced my skills of rapid prototyping. For starters, I had a lot of slide and press fits so finding the right diameter was essential to a successful robot. Since I wanted to test multiple dimensions at a time, I would employ clever labeling techniques that were part of the print so that I could easily refer back to the CAD dimension.

Furthermore, my elliptical walking mechanism took 8 prototypes before I had the perfect tolerances and design. To make this prototype, I just took the body that I had already designed and printed the component housing the elliptical drive unit. While this was effective to ensure my final design would work, I wasted tens of hours on prints only to find that I needed to extend the rods or redesign the slider. Had I just bit the bullet and designed a testing platform, I could have finished the elliptical drive much sooner and then start printing the body to test the final form.

Solidworks was the CAD program of choice for this robot design. I have used Solidworks since 2018 but have never created such a complicated and multiple piece design. Challenging myself to make organic parts, I pushed my design skills and am proud of how few right angles or non flowing sections of the robot exist. My favorite feature that I learned how to use is solidowrk’s equation tool and linking these equations to a notebook. Being able to store dimensions from one part to the next saved me hours when I realized a hole for my M2 screw should be 0.2mm smaller since there are around 50 of these holes. To go in and individually edit the dimension would have taken ages, but simply changing the dimension on my notebook took seconds.

I had never used C++ before this project. Since there was a custom library for the servo motors, learning a new language by referring to the documentation was slow, but a valuable lesson. With python and matlab, documentation is so expansive that I find myself really just relying on forums. However, I learned how to read documentation jargon and could answer questions for myself, instead of needing to go online. There is clear value to dedicating time to learning the fundamental commands and processes instead of jumping into code blindly. Also, I found myself commenting on my code much more to retain and remind me of what I was learning/ coding. I have extended this habit into more projects.

Fasteners, such as nuts and bolts, can be a great asset when assembling, but wow do they slow the manufacturing and assembly portion. An important engineering hard skill I walked away with was my focus on limiting fasteners. Wedges, magnets, or clever designing made my life easier and faster when working on the assemblies which will undoubtedly inform my future engineering designs.

The days where I could not connect to the PyLX-16A library were frustrating to say the least. Struggling to identify the problem, starting from scratch over and over, getting annoyed as fatigue grew, and getting mad that I could not solve what was seemingly a simple problem was making me resent the project. There was one night in particular where I was so fed up with the code, I thought, let me work on the voltage converter. I began playing around with the converter, was not getting the right readings, double, triple checked my multimeter but no matter what, could not get the converter to work. This was supposed to be the easiest integration, simply twist a dial until it read 7.4 V. When this converter failed to work, I left my desk in rage and just walked out of my house towards the forest. The moon was high in the sky as I left around 3am in the morning. Sitting and thinking away from my project was healing and allowed me to mentally take control of the project again. I was lost in the weeds during this week and learned a valuable lesson of exiting the project, taking a break, and coming back with a clear mind. All of my coding and converter issues were solved the next day.