ME72: Capstone Engineering Design Competition

Each year, MechE undergrads form teams to compete in the capstone engineering design competition at Caltech known as ME72. My year, the competition tasked students with designing three robots to collect balls, shoot them into designated goals, and autonomously navigate an obstacle course with two mobile robots and one stationary shooter. Our team of seven loosely divided into three sub-teams working on each robot. I was the primary designer for the collector robot which employed a four-bar linkage to acquire balls from the floor and dispense them into the stationary shooter. The robot was skid-steered with one motor on either side of the drivetrain. Most of the robot was constructed from waterjet aluminum plates for ease of manufacture and the basket was made from laser-cut wood to minimize weight. The basket both passively captured from above and actively captured with a row of compliant wheels as a dual-directional intake. On competition day, our team placed second after recovering from a disabling hardware malfunction that left one of our robots inoperable in the earlier rounds. we were able to act quickly enough to make the necessary repairs and return to competing, making it all the way to the finals without losing a match. A video of the competition can be found on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXDTb6exhY) and further description of the competition can be found [here](https://me72.caltech.edu/me72/2023).