Ping Pong Project

As a group, we were assigned to design a robot built of Lego’s. We were given a kit filled with the Lego’s that we needed to build an adequate robot, and the kit also included the programming CD for the computer. Our robot is supposed to follow a line made of electrical tape across the board and dispense the ping-pong balls it picks up a box at the end of the board. We are allowed to use 3 motors, 2 touch sensors, and 1 rotational sensor. Our robot also has size stipulations of 20x20x30 centimeters. The board that our robot is to operate on is 8x4 feet. The objective for our robot is to pick up and deliver the ping-pong balls in a fast and efficient manner. The robot is to follow a black line of electrical tape that is put on a white laminate floor. The line is not straight and has paths off of the direct path made to confuse the robot. The robot is not supposed to stray from the path that goes to the box, and once it gets to the box it is supposed to dump the ping-pong balls in the box. The box at the end of the path stands 15 centimeters tall. Our robot uses three motors, two motors to drive, and one to operate the forklift scoop. There are two light sensors to sense the black line. There is one touch sensor to sense the box at the end and tell the robot to dump the balls out of the scoop. We had to hypothesize as a group how we could build a robot that could get this job done fast and efficiently. Our limitations and boundaries of this project are all encompassed within the stipulations that were given: the rules on size, number of motors, and number of sensors. To formulate and solve how to work around these limitations we rebuilt our robot a few times. We used trial and error to come up with a robot that would work under the conditions we were given.