The robot is driven by two DC gearmotors directly powering the front wheels. There is a third DC gearmotor mounted vertically on the robot, which drives the balloon popping weapon.
This picture shows some of the electronics on the robot. There is an Arduino Uno mounted in the center which is responsible for controlling all of the robots logic. Two L298n motor drivers are mounted next to the arduino, and power the onboard DC motors. The ESP8266 wifi board is also mounted in this space, and is supplied 3.3V power by the green 18650 cell.
A close up view of the ESP8266 wifi chip.
Main 12V power for the robot comes from the LiPo battery mounted on the underside of the robot. The robot's wheels are made of plastic and extra traction is provided by rubber bands glued on to them. The robot can be turned on and off via the switch at the back.
You can clearly see the attack weapon in this picture: a plastic piece with barbs attached to each end. The robot's own balloon is protected from this weapon via a small piece of cardboard at the rear.
This video shows the robot tracking a balloon in the field of play. We found that the algorithm required a period of straight line movement before each turn in order to determine the direction it was moving in.
This video shows the robot in a battle with another team's bot. Unfortunately, their robot's tracking is non-functional, so it only moves forward. Our bot is able to find and pop their balloon.
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Balloon Battle Bot (Class)
This was a project that I completed with one partner as the final component of my robotics class during the Fall of 2017. The goal of the project was to create a robot whose goal would be to pop an enemy robot's balloon in a limited field of play. To track the balloons, we used a OpenCV color detection scheme run by a Raspberry Pi. Information was relayed to the opposing robots by an ESP8266 wifi board. The robot was fully autonomous, and used an arduino to receive position data from the computer vision system, and determine which direction to move in.
