The robots made by RoboJackets for combat robotics are small and heavily armored, which prevent having a display or interface to read data or make changes on the fly. But, RoboWrestling hopes to tackle that problem with their radio board project. For the past few semesters, electrical members have been working diligently on a custom remote controller that can read sensor data from the robot and allow the team to change the robot’s strategy more freely.
During the competition, robots compete in several rounds during which teams cannot have physical contact with the robot. The weight and size limits of the robots and speed necessary restricts the possible computation power on board, so the autonomous behavior is often very simple algorithms for driving around the arena. In the world of robot-sumo, different robots have different behaviors, and it is a huge competitive advantage if you can change your strategy based on your opponent’s design or behavior. Previously, the RoboWrestling team could only set a single strategy to use. Additionally, the old robots had to be partially dismantled to access the PCBs to do simple debugging, like testing if a sensor was actually working. Solving these two issues is the primary goal of the radio board.
The radio board is surprisingly simple. It consists of a radio transceiver (SparkFun RFM69HCW), a microcontroller (ATMEGA 32u4), and a small LCD screen. The transceiver sends and receives data from a similar chip onboard the robot PCB. The MCU processes the data and displays relevant information to the screen. A few buttons let the user pick a function, like diagnostics, calibration, or strategy selection.
Last spring, the team had a basic working form of the radio boards but faced some challenges. The current board didn’t feature a way to quickly program the MCU, which made it hard to develop for the firmware. This semester, new members worked on making the radio more reliable and the MCU easier to program. The team was successful in sending messages between the boards in their robots Gucci, Kirbi and Spici, but still needed some work on the external board. Currently the team is wrapping up their work on redesigning the radio boards and will hopefully be able to assemble the revised design soon. They plan to fully test the new system in January.