Assembling a home obstacle course for the Elegoo Tumbller robot to navigate… along with some design upgrades.
Beefy title aye? That’s because it is jam packed with lots of exciting stuff. Welcome back to another exciting blog on the Elegoo Tumbller Self-Balancing Robot Car. It’s the part we have all been waiting for…. lets see this little robot in action woo woo!
In the last blog post we had the assembly of the Tumbller Self-Balancing Robot Car along with a Functional Demonstration of what this bad boy can do. I was super excited to delve further into the brains of this robot and program it to do pretty cool things along with designing and in turn fabricating (in a zero cost , hunting for materials in my house type of prototyping way) add on or attachments with are what I'm talking about when I talk about the design upgrades.
For our design module we were tasked with assembling an at home obstacle course for our robots to navigate… this was fabricated with only materials I could find in my house because I’m a student and consequently extremely low on funds… sigh. The obstacle course was to be 60cm wide and 200cm long and had to contain various walls and passages. The reason for building the course is to navigate the Elegoo Tumbller robot through the pain to build obstacle course, stop in an allocated section where the robot is to wait to collect ping pong balls that are fired at it and then cross the finish line…. all without any mishaps which believe me there were many of. I was presented with a schematic of the obstacle course which can be seen below and we had to replicate this to the best of my ability at home. So I gathered up several chunky books, cereal boxes, a measuring tape and various tasty beverages and began the construction.
Coming from a house with two brothers and two sisters space is quite tight so I had to ban them from my designated obstacle course spot for a few days until I fully completed the assignment but hey it’s the cost of being an epic engineer … epic? So not cool mike. To annoy my siblings further I also took all the cereal and board games in the house to construct the walls 60cm apart running the length of the course. The tiles laid out on the floor were approximately 50cm wide so all I had to do measure 10cm with a ruler over the line. As the tiles were 50cm in width the length of the obstacle course was easily obtained, 4 tiles in length… I double checked this with a measuring tape regardless.
Finally the inner obstacles had to go in and be spaced out as instructed via the outline of the assignment. This didn’t take too long and wasn’t too bad as I used very delicious ice cold beverages… good idea at the time but 10 minutes into the assignment and they were staring at me begging to be drank but I had to refrain…until I was finished that is.
We were presented with two options for the first obstacle that the robot would encounter. The width of the gate in easy mode is 30cm and in hard mode, its 25cm. The gate distance was 50cm from the starting point and the robot had to squeeze through this obstacle where it would continue from there. I chose to try out both options and in the end I ended up going with the hard mode for my final video. The video of the fully built obstacle course can be found over on my instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mike.engineering/
After the robot navigates through the obstacle course, it has to stop in a grid at the end of the course. This was a 60cm by 30cm zone which equates to three A4 sheets of paper orientated as show in the above photo. The robot can only stop in this grid for 20 seconds where it is to preform a task and then leave the grid…. more on this task later.
So where and what the frick is the final obstacle course construction…. feast your eyes on this home made marvel of miscellanea.
Another view of this beauty……..
There is it, the fully built obstacle course created to the exact parameters as stated in the assignment brief. Whats to come you might be asking, well…. I’m going to program the robot to complete the course, build a ping pong ball launcher where the robot will collect the balls and a few design upgrades to aid/enable the robot to complete these tasks.
Design Upgrades.
To provide the robot with the ability to collect the ping pong balls when they’re launched, an attachment to the robot must be added. I chose to fashion a metal box to the top of the robot to act as a catching basket for the fired balls. With the metal boxes top surface area of 11.5cm by 11.5cm it just about managed to fit the requirement to have the max surface area of the basket holding the ping-balls to 133cm² (approx perimeter of 340g cereal box). Mine fell below that thankfully and this should earn me some bonus points woo.
What can also be seen in the photo above if you have a detective eye is the stabilisation attachment I made to provide the robot with stable balancing properties. It no longer has to rely on it’s self balancing capabilites. A repurposed metal object which I found in my attic was used. The object was hallow so I got the great idea to drill a hole on either side so I could thread something through it which would make life a lot easier when it came to attaching this aid to the robot. The metal was quite thin so drilling the holes wasn’t an issue. The attachment of this aid to the robot worried me initially because I didn’t want to make it permanent and consequently damage the robot upon removal. The solution…. fishing line threaded through the drilled holes wrapped around the foothold of the robot and tied off neatly. A few of sellotape of course was also added for sturdiness.
This attachment provides the robot with another point of contact to the floor which acts with the wheels in a triangular (tricycle-esque) layout. As I built the obstacle course on a low friction tiled surface and based on the smooth surface finish on the metal piece, the attachment will glide effortlessly along the ground while still maintaining its function to provide support.
Videos of both attachments can be seen on my previously linked instagram account, you should defiantly check it out. Also stay tuned with this blog series for more interesting and exciting content.
Peace and Love,
Michael.
