Club Robotique INSA Strasbourg - Eurobot 2019

Our projet
Eurobot is a European wide competition of autonomous robots. It is a 4 day long competition, taking place each year in La Roche sur Yon, a small town in west of France. 200 european Teams meet each other during 100 seconds long games. At the end, the team who Scored the most points wins.
This year, for the 150th anniversary of the publication of the peridodic table of elements by D. Mendeleiv, they choose chemistry as main theme. Red, green and blue hockey pucks play the role of atoms we have to sort depending on their color and mass.

Official banner of this year's event, featuring our last year's robot !!

The Team
We are a team of engineering Student from INSA Strasbourg  (National Institut of Applied Sciences of Strasbourg) and each year we take part in the French Cup of Robotics, qualification for Eurobot 2019. We come from different horizons (Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Mechatronics, Architecture, Plastics Engineering,...) and are not supported by teachers. We design and build our robots during our free time.
Some members also dispense introductory courses about robotics in differents schools (age 3 to 10) of Strasbourg, in order to sensitize childrens to sciences and robotics. We think it is important for future generations to know how the different

Technical details
The "brain" of the robot is a Raspberry Pi 3. The Raspberry decides of the strategy, determines trajectories,... We also use the Raspberry to analyse the surroundings of the robot (find atoms,...) thanks to a camera and OpenCV.

View of our motherboard

It communicates with the main pcb, on which a dsPIC32 is used. The dsPIC32 controls the motors, proximity sensors, some actuators (servomotors,...). The enslavement of the robot is assured by this microcontroller.
In order to catch the atoms, we will use 6 arms with vaccum pumps and color sensors, 3 on the front side of the robot and 3 on the back side. In order to control the pumps, servos and color sensors, we have build an extra card, using an ATMEGA 328p. We used a similar card last year to catch cubes and determine their color with a 3 degree of liberty RRR arm.

3D model of the card controlling the actuators

The last card aims to control a touchscreen. It will allow us to control easily the robot and have better feedback of the different sensors and actuators.
The mechanical pieces are made of aluminium and steal. As the actuators are not subject to heavy efforts, the actuators are laser cut in wood. Some non functional pieces are 3D printed.

CAD Model of our robot

Words to PCBWay
Since few years now we fabricate our pcbs at PCBWay and were never disappointed. This year again we wish to fabricate our different cards at PCBWay.
Our team has made it twice to the final rounds for few years and we aim to get to the final this year ! We use the same basis as last year and had time to develop reliable code and improve the mechanics of the base.

Some line follower robots at the open days of our school

We offer great visibility to our sponsors during the competition : hundreds of young engineers and future professionals visit the stands and look at our robots. We also present our sponsors during event troughout the year around Strasbourg, where we present our association, activities and robots.
Our current sponsors include RS Components, IGUS, RF Conception, the Student Association of our school,...

Contact
https://www.facebook.com/clubrobotiqueinsastras/