David Carratu

Paul Gelhaus

Mateo Guaman

Chris Reik

Halloween Robot Documentation

For this Halloween Project our group decided to create a robot exhibit where the kids come up to our table and press a button to start the action of the robots. First a robot comes out from under the table and swings a bone arm back and forth, hitting the kids feet. Then our robot shoots a couple of pieces of starburst at the children. We used one brick for the candy shooter and one brick on the robot that drives out from under the table. We daisy-chained the two bricks together and made the launcher brick the master brick. We programmed on LabVIEW for this project. We created the code for motors that move the launcher and the motors that drive the brick and swing the arm in a while loop so that our robotic exhibit is repeatable throughout the 45 minutes of the Haunted House. The entire code is in this while loop so it as all repeatable. The code that swings to arm back and forth three times everytime the button is pressed is in a for loop that iterates 3 times. Then the code calls for the motors of the shooter to turn on and fire out a starburst candy. We had to slowly turn the motors on with wait fors and increasing slowly to higher motor powers becuase at first we had the motors turn on right away and we noticed that at such high speeds we were wearing the gears. 

    The launcher of portion of the robot uses a brick and three large motors. Two large motors are used to spin the two rubber wheels. By gearing up the spin of the motors we were able to get the wheels to spin fast enough in order to shoot out starburst candy at a high speed. We spent a lot of time making the gearing system as compact as it could be. Then we made a feeder system using the third motor which drives two sets of tread belts that feed one starburst at a time into the launcher. This part of the robot is inside of a box that sits on the table. The candy shoots out a slit in the box through the open mouth of a skeleton skull.

    The base of the bottom part of our robot is the EV3 brick, which rests upon two large sideways wheels and two beams extending outwards. The beams have long pieces of cardboard on top of them, which are taped to the top of a box to ensure that the robot does not move around. We created the the arm out of beams and plastic skeleton bones. The arm is attached to one motor that provides the force of swinging the arm back and forth to hit the feet of unexpecting people. The bones are connected to the robot in a tight square structure of beams near the end of the arm, and a few connected rubber bands reduce its sagging. This part of the robot sits under the table.