Student Projects

 '07 Micromouse

William Bryan and Joe Hayden built the micromouse for the 2007 micromouse competition. The goal was to build a small robot capable of navigating from on corner of a maze to the center. Idealy, it would get to the center as quickly as possible and then return to its starting corner. William and Joe won second place at the competition for their Micromouse.      Hardware: The body of the robot was completely custom made; the main component of which was old CDs. The motors were driven with a prebuilt h-bridge from Robot Objects. The microcontroller used was the Parallax BASIC Stamp SX. Parallex Ultrasonic Range Sensors were used for the wall sensors. However, these sensors proved to be difficult to work with.      Software: A modified flooding algorithm was used because of the small amount of memory it requires. Using this method, the robot would base its decision on which way would get it closer to the center of the maze.

 A.S.P.S

Dante Papada and Jason Shilinski built and automated parallel parking robot with which they won first place at the IEEE SAC project showcase competition and first place at the Morton Paper Contest.      Hardware: They used an old R/C car as a base. They then used Parallax Ultrasonic Range Sensors and IR Proximity Sensors to detect a place to park and to ensure they did not hit anything while parking.      Software: They used a Parallax BASIC Stamp SX to power their robot with extensive code to ensure the robot could park without hitting any objects.