The final project for the Design of Mechatronic Systems class is a annual autonomous hockey tournament dubbed Robockey. Students split up into teams of four and spend the last three weeks of the semester developing and tuning three fully autonomous hockey robots.

The hockey puck is specially designed to emit infrared light so that the robots can determine the puck’s location using an array of phototransistors around their base. Each robot is also equipped with a camera from a Nintendo Wii remote which allows them to determine their location on the rink using an infrared “constellation” 25 feet above the rink.

I was in charge of the mechanical design on my team, however with such a small team and short timeframe I also worked on many of the other subsystems on the robots, including the wireless communications coding, setting up the serial motor controllers, puck finding, as well as countless hours of debugging and testing.

In addition to technical work, the high-pressure, fast-paced nature of the competition significantly developed my teamwork, communication, and organizational skills.

(My team has green/red LED’s on top)