• Robotics

    Evoborne - Mass Robotics’ Form and Function Challenge 2024

    It all started when I see an iconic project by Caltech, it immediately spiked my imaginations and I was curious to build one myself

    The Story

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    The mere idea of making a single vehicle be amphibian is crazy, I have been trying to imagine such structure since I was a child.

    So, about 6 months later there comes out SRA's most awaited competitions ... AMD Mass Robotics Form and Function Challenge 2024. Here Multiple teams around the world participate to make very different solutions in robotics to enhance exploration capabilities of the robot and explore various algorithms with which they can be equipped to understand the environment better.

    I had certain ideas to explore and then randomly my friend Raj Gupta shares the same project amidst the confusion of choosing one. And I immediately loved the dream idea and started preparing the team for it.

    Gory Details

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    • So anyone will easily realize how thought out and sorted is the design for original morphobot, given that it was a work of years by Caltech. Well, you might not know me but I am always unrealistically optimistic and I was really excited to make the whole thing in 2 months.

    • There are major design choices in the arm section itself. So, initially I started a very basic design (that's what initially thought ha..haa..). To put things into perspective I was designing my own bearing. Like about the whole 15 days of design, I now understand my design was pretty useless.

    Then things stared to take shape, when I redesigned the new better design with outsourced bearings. Man that was a really hot day to buy bearings outside. Shoutout to Marck Koothoor a good helping senior!

    The actual design after sometime...

    • The major part of leg design was done, with only one catch I still didn't made the whole assembly printable.. as I wanted the bot to "Modular". How big of a mistake it was!!!

    • First we waited the parts to be printed, while we were busy studying for our Mid semester exams, And once parts were here we couldn't assemble them again due to MSTs.

    So, just after MSTs we got our perfectly printed parts from a very "generous" vendor.. Let's just call them "XXfy". They gave us some extra parts out of no where to work on. And charged us just 10,141 INR. Anyways, we started assembling the parts and guess how much time it took for us to assemble the whole one leg... Okay let's say more than 5 days and less than 7.

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    After some corrections (like just a million of them which cost us billions of seconds... ;()

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    • So, the new assembly had a leg with all the subparts and the parts were given for 3D print. Then came a long wait for the prints to complete. I still remember it was a weekend and we gave the prints on thursday and were expecting all the high quality prints to arrive on Saturday. Then it was just a matter of bad printing that the Saturday became Sunday and Sunday became Monday... Then we finally got our parts on Monday morning (which was the deadline for the competition). Then the quality of the prints weren't that good. That was a real bummer. So, we went out without paying anything... Thanks to our fin head "Atre"

    • While waiting for prints we had a night out assembling the previous design and test its rigidity and it worked with all the electronics hanging around.

    • And this was the look of the mini monster that we created.

    Now, comes the infinite hell of testing the flight

    • As we were the classic rookies in the domain of drones and flight testing, we took a rope and tied to our bot, got a 10 year old flight controller from the SRA's Mega-inventory (Magic ka pitara).

    • The girl in the bg is Shankari A. really smart and fast learner... And scared of everything lol. Anyways sorry shankari couldn't edit you out :l

    • I hope I could've given you (the reader) a happy ending of how it flew and did all the tasks we planned for but unfortunately the story still continues and we are working on it and hopefully it will fly before I graduate

    Well, every project is successful in bringing pleasant and very exciting experiences to the life of its creators. The fact that this even got to the stage where we have the whole chassis and each and every motor works the way wanted it to work is a magic in itself for me at least.

    I can't thank enough to my best-friend (never said to his face though :_) ) Zain, and some of the most motivated individuals: Atharvax3 (yeah there are 3 atharva's in this project), Shankari, Sarvesh, Saish, and Mahesh (Thanks for soldering that 4in1 ESC at the middle of the night)