Club Robotique INSA Strasbourg - Eurobot 2020

Our project

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, the main theme is based on sailing activity. As accomplished sailors, the robots will have to create some fairways using beacons represented by green and reds ecocups, but also deploy a lighthouse element external from the robot.

Game area of the 2020's Eurobot Competition

The Team

We are a team of engineering students from INSA Strasbourg (National Institute of Applied Sciences of Strasbourg) who takes part in the French Cup of Robotics each year, qualification step for Eurobot 2020 (have a watch of our after-movie from the 2019 competition below). 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.

The Eurobot participation isn't our only activity along the year. As we know that the future generations will live with an increasing robots' presence in their own lives, we participate to some introducing events in order to sensitize children to sciences and robotics (Science festival, Hour of code festival, ...).

Our team surrounding the year's game area, that allow us testing our robots in competition's conditions !

Technical details of our main solution

The strategy and trajectories are decided by a Raspberry Pi 3, that could be seen as the "brain" of our robot. As a human brain, the Raspberry Pi 3 is linked to a vision system which is materialized by an integrated camera. An OpenCV based program finally analyze the environment of the robot to make moving decisions.

Routing view of our 2020's motherboard

The Raspberry Pi 3 then communicates with the motherboard, on which a dsPIC32 is embedded. The dsPIC32 is assuring the enslavement of the robot by PID position's control of the motion motors. This micro-controller also control the different actuators by communication to the other subsystems cards.

3D model of our 2020's motherboard

Indeed, we opted this year for a subdivided electronic scheme. That's why we have build some extras cards, such a PCB controlling the 3-axis scara arm used to catch ecocups, and an other PCB controlling the actuators and sensors used to organize the ecocups' storage inside the robot. This cards are both embedding an ATMEGA 328p and communicate with the motherboard presented upper. We used similar cards last year to control 6 arms with vacuum pumps and color sensors to catch the atoms on the game area.

The last card aims to control the lighthouse deployment and lighting. The design of this PCB is thought for a well integration in the deploying system and allow the control of power LEDs for better lighting.

The mechanical pieces are laser cut in wood and some others non functional pieces are 3D printed. The integration of our PCBs is thought in order to optimize the space cost but also to have an easy access to electonics during debug phases.

CAD model of our robot

Words to PCBWay

We chose a few years ago start working with PCBway to fabricate the different PCBs included in our robots. We were never disappointed by the quality of the PCBway's realizations and delivery times. For this reasons, we want to entrust the realization of our cards to PCBway this year again.

As our team is progressing each year in the main ranking of the Eurobot competition, we aim to access the final rounds this year ! Our experience in mechanics design assure us making a robust basis for our robot. A large part of our team is also working on strategy's code in order to still improving the performances of our moving and obstacle avoidance code.

View of the robotic team's stand in the organizations' day of our engineering school

We offer great visibility to our sponsors during the competition, where hundreds of young engineers and future professionals visit the stand looking at our robots.

We also present our sponsors during events throughout the year around Strasbourg, where we present our association, activities and robots.

Our current sponsors also include RS Components, IGUS, RF Conception, the Student Association of our school, ...

Contact

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Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/club_robot_insa/