Senior Design RoboCup

Kicking Mechanism for the Pioneer 3-DX Robot
Landry Nzudie, IUPU-Fort Wayne
Francois Mikobi, IUPU-Fort Wayne
Mark Macki, IUPU-Fort Wayne
Charles Craft, IUPU-Fort Wayne
Miguel Tostado, IUPU-Fort Wayne
Faculty Advisor: Yanfei Liu, IUPU-Fort Wayne
Jiaxin Zhao, IUPU-Fort Wayne
Student Poster Description
RoboCup is an international joint organization to promote artificial intelligence and robotics. The goal of
the RoboCup project is to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the
human world champion team in soccer, by 2050. IPFW and Raytheon have combined in a five-year
project to promote robotics through the development of soccer playing automatons. The partnership has a
larger vision to develop soccer playing robots that could compete in the Middle Size League (MSL) of the
RoboCup competition in 2012. Raytheon has provided a Pioneer 3-DX robot base for the development of a
RoboCup Middle Size League robot soccer player. Our teams mission is to design and build a kicking
mechanism and a microcontroller based unit to interface and control the kicker with the provided base
robot. When completed, the final robot should be programmed to locate an orange, size 5 FIFA ball on a
green field, approach the ball, orient the ball towards the goal, and finally kick it in that direction. Several
ideas of designs were initially generated; each of them was evaluated in order to generate the most
optimal final design. The mechanical kicker of our final design will consist of two pneumatic cylinders
utilizing compressed nitrogen, which will be engaged and controlled by a PIC microcontroller based
interface unit. This interface unit basically includes three main sub-interfaces: the Serial interface between
the PIC microcontroller and the Pioneer 3-DX robot microcontroller which will allow the command of the
robot at a higher level; the driving interface with the PIC converting a PWM voltage to a current sending to
the solenoid valves; and finally the proximity sensor interface with the PIC microcontroller to aid in the
positioning of the robot with respect to the ball. This project will constitute one of the multidisciplinary
senior designs in Department of Engineering at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne which
extend over a one year period of time.

Category:

Science & Technology

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• Design
• RoboCup
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• Music