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A Kicking Mechanism for a Soccer Playing Robot – a Multidisciplinary Senior Design Project

Abstract

This paper describes a multidisciplinary capstone senior design project that involves the design, build and test stages1. It is a two-semester project that was conducted by five senior students in the Department of Engineering at Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW). The objective of this project is to design and build a kicking mechanism that can be seamless attached to a Pioneer 3-DX mobile robot. The Pioneer 3-DX robot and kicker combination should be able to locate a soccer ball, approach and control it and finally kick it in a desired determined direction a minimum of five meters, through preprogrammed kicking strategies. This paper also describes several different assessment approaches used throughout the project. The faculty members from the Department of Engineering and the local sponsors conduct the assessment. The assessment results are provided. The impact on the engineering curriculum of this on-going Robocup project is also discussed at the end.

Introduction

In August 2007, the College of Engineering, Technology and Computer Science at IPFW and a local company initiated a 5-year project to promote robotics, artificial intelligence, and software engineering in the college curricula. The main goal of this project is to build a robot team to compete in the Robocup Middle Size League competition2 by 2012. This project also aims at introducing robotics into a variety of computer science and engineering courses. As part of the first year plan, a Pioneer 3-DX robot was purchased. Using this robot as a development platform, the first task was to design and build a kicking mechanism that is seamlessly connected and interfaced with this robot. This task was carefully reviewed by the professors whose expertise are in Robotics and machine design, and determined to be an appropriate two-semester multidisciplinary capstone senior design project. Two of the professors, one in ECE and one in ME, became the faculty advisors for this project. It was also proposed that this project will require 2~3 EE/CmpE students and 2 ME students. In fall 2007, the students started from the formulation of the problem, generation of conceptual designs, evaluation of the conceptual designs, and finished with a detailed design of the final picked design. In spring 2008, the students built the system and conducted the experimental testing.

There were a total of four conceptual designs generated3. The team evaluated these four conceptual designs based on the following criteria: ease of implementation, reliability, size constraint, cost, and etc. Then the top rated design was chosen as the final design. The CAD drawing and a picture of the final built system are shown in Figure 1. The kicking system is composed of a pneumatically driven kicker, a PIC microcontroller based control and driving unit, and software design3. The Pioneer 3-DX robot and its attached kicking system had to be able to locate a soccer ball, approach the ball, and control it. It also had to be able to kick the ball in a particular direction for a minimum of 5 meters. RoboCup provides rules regarding the size and weight limitations of the robot for specific leagues. These restrictions together with the given dimensions and weight of the Pioneer robot determined the allowable size and weight of the kicking system. The PIC based control and driving unit were designed to provide enough

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Liu, Y., & Zhao, J. (2009, June), A Kicking Mechanism For A Soccer Playing Robot: A Multidisciplinary Senior Design Project Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--5612