Autodesk Inventor Design Competition 2009

Every year, aside from the Robotics Competition, Autodesk (a leading company in the computer aided drafting industry) lends out their latest version of Inventor to FIRST Teams to use in building their robot for the competition. Inventor is a program that allows you to test design ideas without wasting materials because it is a 3D modeling program. Everything can be drawn up on the computer first, tested, and then manufactured. This year, Vanden Robotics Team 701 put forth the most effort than they have in previous years to use the Inventor design process, and even entered their 3D model into the Autodesk Inventor Competition, as of Feb 24, 2009, 9:08 pm. Here is the rendered image of the 3D model (no simple task to produce):

There were two main students who contributed to Team 701’s entry in the Autodesk Inventor Design Competition for 2009.

Troy...is a first year student in the Robotics class... He found and stuck to his passion to model the entire robot during build season, and used Inventor to help solve several important design issues before the robot was even built.

Kim...is a third year student in the Robotics class... She put forth considerable time to produce pieces, assemblies, and drawings of the Inventor model to aid in the fabrication of the actual robot.

Here are some of the aspects of Team 701’s robot in which Autodesk Inventor was a significant help:

This year the team wanted to have a turret to accurately shoot balls one at a time. The problem was designing a turret that could be placed as near to a corner of the robot (for optimal range) as possible, without going outside the parameters. In Inventor, we were able to compact the motor and gearing system used to propel the moon rocks to their targets, as well as design a tensioned motor system for turning the turret:

The team also decided that transporting empty cells to trade for super cells would be an important aspect of scoring in Lunacy. The Hook Of Doom is our response to this situation. It needed to be simple, lightweight, but durable enough that the weight of the ball would not break the arm or the servo to which the arm is attached. It also had to remain within the boundaries of the robot. There is a Hook Of Doom on the right side of the robot as well as in the front:

In previous years, team 701 has frequently used a chained drive system. This year, we wanted independent drive for all four wheels to provide better control. Plus, chain is quite a hefty sacrifice of the robot's weight allowance. Again thanks to Inventor, we designed a compact, gear-to-gear drive system for each wheel. The wheel shaft fits nicely through the bottom corner of the tough box:

Once the robot was 85% finished, we realized that the hopper design had a flaw. No matter what shape the hopper is, when you try to combine multiple ball paths into a single path, there is going to be inconvenient wedging. So we added an oscillatory system much like you would find on locomotive wheels, which we now call tink-tink. This way, when the conveyer is ready to take more moon rocks, the agitator oscillates with the rotation of the conveyer system and breaks up those nasty ball-blockages:

To learn more about the Autodesk Design Competition's 2008 previous winners and the criteria, visit http://firstbasefrc.autodesk.com/?nd=competition. Sometime in the next several months, the winners of 2009 should be posted (Team 701 hopes to be there!)