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Autonomous Firing Robot

Overview

This project was created in 2023 as a class project by Adesuwa Dawodu and her coursemates. Adesuwa built the circuit and wrote the programming. The aim of this project was to create a robot that would fire at several targets placed at predetermined positions without being controlled.

The Challenge

A major challenge Adesuwa had with this project had to do with the firing speed. The motor speed was inconsistent. After the motor had been running for a period of time, the speed of the motor would slow down, regardless of what speeed was programmed on the pwm. Another challenge involved

The Approach

The circuit consisted of an Arduino Uno board, a solenoid, a brushless motor, battery, etc. As Adesuwa was familiar with programming in C, programming the Arduino board was very feasible. The Arduino Servo library was used to control the motion of the bot, and its firing speed.

The Solution

The firing mechanism consisted of a wheel, near the end of the barrel, fitted onto a brusheless motor.

To fire at a target, a rotary actuator was used to turn the base of the device and another linear actuator was used to lower and raise the barrel in order to aim correctly. Then the motor speed was set and then the solenoid at the top of the barrel was released momentarily so as to allow a nerf ball into the barrel at which point the wheel which was being spun would fire out the nerf ball at the target.

Project code can be viewed on Github repository.