Over Terrain Vehicle

Out of 60+ teams competing: Best Constructed Vehicle Award Best Fire Mission OTV Award

In the UMD Autonomous Robotics Project (Over Terrain Vehicle, OTV), I led a team of 5 students over the course of 3 months on a budget of $320 to design, build, code, test, and compete a robot capable of extinguishing fire and navigating autonomously via. ArUco Markers.  Out of 60+ competing teams, we won the Best Constructed Vehicle Award and the Best Fire Mission OTV Award.  On the team, I directed the robotics design, creating fully animated CAD models and renderings of the vehicle.  I also led the coding for the robot - which, through over 100 iterations of code, uses corrective navigation to achieve movement accuracy of within 1 cm anywhere in the arena.  We also were the only team to opt for a fully acrylic structure, which was chosen for its weight/strength ratio, and laser cut to design specifications.

On this project, I learned about iterative design, laser cutting, Arduino programming, soldering, electronics, sensors, corrective navigation, and much more.  We had many things go wrong during this project, which gave us many opportunities to grow, and improve on our designs.  As can be seen in the photo below: Firstly, the arm that flips over to extinguish the flame was originally too brittle and weak, so we added structural T-sections to strengthen it.  The Arduino Uno (seen inside the robot) would frequently stop working, and the team members would feel a shock when touching the robot after navigation.  This issue perplexed us for a while until we discovered that the acrylic material had properties that caused static charge build-up moving along the soft-carpet-like texture of the arena, and when we touched the Arduino after movement, it caused an electrical surge through the Arduino, resulting in it failing.  We fixed this issue by separating the Arduino from the robot via a raised wooden piece, and by grounding the robot through a metal piece, allowing the built-up static charge to dissipate.  This project provided me an opportunity to apply the engineering and leadership skills I learned from FIRST Robotics in High School to a college-level engineering problem.