Ball Manipulation

You can take a look at our first design at the picture. The mechanism assumes that the balls are sufficiently compressable (and the motors in the mechanism strong enough), so that it is possible to ignore the fact that the balls are not spheres.

The mechanism works like this: the robot moves forward and approaches the red ball. At this moment the brown cylinder is rotating slowly, with constant velocity. The robot drives to the ball in a way that the ball will be pushed between the cylinder and the floor first and later then between the cylinder and the green metal sheet (the colors and nomenclature taken from the schematic figure). Similar to Barbora, but without the spiral. Then the brown cylinder is stopped and the robot has to line up to the target. The ball is secured between the cylinder and the green metal sheet and it is possible to drive through the area. When it is lined up, the brown cylinder starts rotating again. The ball is caught by the violet cylinder that rotates with a higher velocity. That shoots the ball out. The violet cylinder's rotation velocity determines the shape of the ballistic curve that the ball follows.

You can see the first prototype made by Pavel Jiroutek (Team Short Circuits Praha) on a video (you need the Xvid-codec to play – download i.e. at http://koepi.roeder.goe.net/xvid.shtml). Even prototype that simple worked astonishingly well. The cylinder only needs a simple and small sprocket made out of Merkur (czech version of Meccano). However it cannot shoot yet.

The prototype confirmed that a relatively strong motor is necessary to power the main cylinder in order to overcome situations when the ball gets stuck inside. The prototype uses a servo, modified for continuous rotation which, alas, does not fulfill the requirements. Stronger motor is the so-called brute-force appproach that usually works and is relatively easy to implement but should be the last resort only when no “nicer” solution can be found.

What alternatives are there to solve our problem? We will search for an answer to this question until we better understand why this problem arises and under what circumstances.

The ball can enter the shooting mechanism in an arbitrary orientation. As long as it arrives “flatwise” everything is fine and it is transported further without any problems. However when the ball enters oriented with the “tip forwards” it could get stuck. The cylinder would try to rotate the ball further into the direction where it is not round and than would not work out fine .

There are to possible ways to deal with this:

The team Short Circuits Praha selected the first solution. Thanks to the fact that the ball can be rolled in only one direction it is possible to push the ball infront of the robot for a while. That lines up the ball in such a way that it can freely roll into the direction of the robot movement. This is also the optimal orientation for the ball to be sucked in by the cylinder.

We chose the second solution, because we hope that the shooting mechanism will be more reliable and robust and finally also faster. Basic building blocks are wooden beads. The big brown cylinder from our previous design is adapted so that beads are spread out across the whole surface. That allows pushing the ball to the side without friction. The “green metal sheet” is also replaced with a construction made of the beads. Further the construction is shaped in a way that the middle section is further from the cylinder and the edges are closer.

Holes for the beads drilled into the cylinder are on a spiral and the wooden beads are threaded on a copper wire that is wound up on the cylinder.

The whole construction can be seen on our drawing. The upper section contains the shooting mechanism which consists of two independent cylinders which provide the ball with the required energy. Their design is based especially on the following data and computations:

A parabolic flight form is assumed, without air friction and the ball enters the goal at the top of the curve (you can watch the mechanism on a video).

Shooting upward

Shooting forward

Because the relation of ball and the cylinder energy is quadratic in relation to the velocity with which the ball is let go, the energy ratio 1:10 stays fixed even for higher velocities and it even gets better, because the deformation energy is a constant. When brass is used, the energy ratio is 1:30 (that is for shooting the ball into a distance of 2 m with an angle of 10 degrees only 1/30 of the energy of the cylinder is necessary).

The shooting mechanism can be watched on the video while shooting forwards and upwards.

We get back to you with more information as soon as we finish the mechanism.

We are sorry but due to the work on the robot we somehow did not manage to complete this article earlier. The good news is though, that the suggested mechanism worked (nearly) flawlessly during the competition.

You can see how the finished mechanism looked like when mounted onto Ester on the picture. The front part (in front of the camera that is used to search for the balls) contains an infrared barrier to detect the incoming balls. Other sensors include the encoders (without the possibility to detect the direction of the rotation) on each of the three cylinders. The sensory equipment could be mentioned as one of the biggest shortcomings. During the time we designed the whole mechanism, it was not really clear what kind of sensors would be needed and so we implemented something simple thinking that should that prove to be insufficient we will improve it. But as the competition date came closer and closer we had many things of greater urgency. Apart from that, even now it is unclear how the optimal solution would look like.

When we shot the ball to the goal right after colection, everything was fine. Problems arose in the moment when we decided to collect several balls and shoot them altogether. The algorithm for one ball looked like this: (a) turn on the cylinder (b) when the infrared barrier is interrupted count N encoder ticks and stop the cylinder (c) report a ball in the robot. The modification for two balls was quite complicated. The actual algorithm was more or less the same, but the problem lied in the detecton of the number of balls in the robot. When searching for one ball, it didn't matter how many balls the robot actually collected (1, 2 or 3?), but when searching for more balls this information was “somewhat” crucial.

Apart from that the strategy to search for several balls proved to be an almost complete failure. During the first two fights in France we did not score even once, because Ester kept on searching for a second ball after it had already collected the first and typically ran into the opponent in the meantime which caused the loss of position tracking and defacto the end of all chances. We returned to our strategy “collect-and-shoot” but due to profound modifications of the code to support collecting several balls, the detection was not reliable.

On the other hand it was really nice to watch the actual shooting. The shooting cylinders were crancked up to the appropriate speed for the given distance to the goal and all balls in the robot were shoved through it gradually. Aside from temporary drop-outs of the encoders due to loose contacts, noone could really complain. Ester shot without bigger problems even over the diagonal and always hit the goal.

If you have questions or remarks – contact us. We will happily answer you. Thanks for most of the fotos, videos and computations to Vojtěch Pavlík.