Sumo Bots was my first university competition. I teamed up with my roommate, ready to build my first-ever robot. Honestly, we were both clueless about how to make it but didn't give up(almost did). Firstly, we had to figure out how to make a chassis for the robot. Luckily, we had some CAD skills from our first-year Cornerstone Projects course. So we started designing our robot in Autodesk Inventor. We kept the design simple (we didn't know how to design a more complex design at the time lol) and lightweight. It was just a cube with holes for sensors along with a scoop in the front so that we could use it to take out other robots because that is the main function of a Summo bot. Then we started to assemble the hardware that Mac Sumobots gave us. We had four wheels, an Arduino nano, motor controllers, IR sensors, ultrasonic sensors and a battery. We looked at some schematics online on how to put the wires together through all this stuff. (my roommate carried me through this part not gonna lie). Then I used the instructions given by the Mac sumo bots on how to code an Arduino board using the Arduino IDE (my first time using this). Uploaded and ran some sample code, and the tires spun, great!
We still had no clue on how to use the IR and ultrasonic sensor but we ignored this issue for now. The next challenge was to fabricate the CAD design that we had. The only feasible option was to print it using a 3-D printer in one of the McMaster’s libraries. Unfortunately for us, all the printers were booked for the next 2 weeks and our competition was in 3 days. The next option was Amazon Prime. Yes, we started to look for the cheapest 3D printers that we could get delivered the next day through prime delivery. Sounds crazy but you know what they say, desperate times call for desperate measures. Some might say this is pay-to-win ( because it is) but my roommate, a hardware junkie, actually had been saving up to buy a 3D printer since the summer so I gaslighted him into buying it right now. Fun fact, he was able to pay off the printer by the end of the year by offering 3D printing services to desperate college students like us.
Anyway, back to the story, so we got the printer the night before the competition. We were sooo back. We assembled it quickly(it took us 2 hours). We ran the test print and guess what, no filament came out and the printer was just moving around and making noises. At this point it was already midnight, we were both kinda tired yet still motivated. So we went straight to Google and browsed through all the tutorials. We eventually had to disassemble the entire nozzle because it was jammed as we inserted the filament incorrectly. We started the print again and it worked! No, we put our design in the printer. Then we just let the printer cook in the middle of the night in our dorm (it was very loud) while we started making some ramen because it was a 3-hour print. While it was printing, I started tinkering with sensors trying to figure out how they work and what outputs they give. When the print finished, we put all the hardware inside the robot and the robot was finally assembled at 4 am! No all that was left was to program the bot so that it stays inside the ring (as you can see in the GIF) and push the enemy robot out of the ring. My friend wasn’t a coding fan so I had to fully take over this part. I made the program in Arduino IDE using C++ such that whenever the IR sensor detects the white boundary line the robot moves forward a certain distance as the IR sensors were at the back of the bot. Also, it keeps on spinning in one position so whenever the other robots come in the line of sight of the ultrasonic sensor, the robot stops spinning and moves forward in that direction indefinitely until it reaches the white line. This was all done in the loop section of the code. This process took me about 2 hours. I uploaded the final code and slept without any testing (trusting my calculation would work). Guess what, they worked! when we got to the competition and we turned the robot on, it was performing exactly how I had expected it to perform. We were able to get to the top 5 teams out of 20+ teams. Me and my roommate were extremely proud of this and had never expected to make it this far in the competition. The journey was crazy but in the end, it all worked out!