PROJECT: ABU ROBOCON 2022

Abu Robocon is an annual robotics competition organized by Abu Robocon Broadcasting which is an international organization. It is a prestigious robotics competition joined by many universities in Malaysia and also around the world. UTM Robocon Team has been standing since 2002 and has won 1st place in domestic competition multiples time. It was my honor to be able to become one of 3 programmers during my year. I was tasked to program and tune the Lagori Pickup Robot or R2. 

Work Language: Fully English

My Daily Working Hours: 8.30 PM - 3 AM

Joined since December 2020 until February 2022

What have I learnt?

I enhanced my C language programming and my critical thinking tremendously.

I was able to learn and work with many things related to robotics such as;-

i. Communication Protocols (SPI, I2C, CAN and UART) 

ii. Sensors and Actuators (IMU, Limit Switch, Analog Sensor, Laser, DC Motors, Brushless Motors, Servos, and Pneumatics)

iii. Mechanical Fabrication (Metal Welding, Grinding, Cutting and Drilling)

iv. Pneumatics System (Cylinder and Tubing)

v. Computer Vision

vi. Microprocessor (Microchip and STMicroelectronics) (STMF407 series)

Competition YouTube Live Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-L84ocbFVQ&t=9822s

2 robots (R1 and R2) need to be built by each team. During the shooting time, R1 needs to shoot a lagori pile. Then, R2 needs to hold a ball on its head while picking up the lagori while at the same time, the opponent's R1 will try to shoot the ball on the head. 

Abu Robocon 2022: https://www.aburobocon2022.com/

Game Promotional Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alyFeLdOGgo

No source code can be shown; therefore, I will only share what we have in our library.

First of all, we use the STM32F407 chip for our mainboard and navigation board. We use STM32CUBEIDE as our development environment in conjunction with c language. Our library is filled with stable firmware for each actuator and sensor that we use on our robot. All of this firmware is written by the members themselves.

During my year, we didn't develop any firmware as no new actuators or sensors were introduced. But we work more on developing computer vision, as it is required for ball-on-head detection and lagori detection.

Although we didn't develop any firmware, we have to study each and understand it. This helps with my overall programming skills and makes me much more comfortable editing and tuning the library to fit my R2 robot.

Our low-level system uses FreeRTOS as its operating system. This ensures the timing performance of the system are within our expectations. 

Pictures of the library: