For the final project of my 1A term in Mechatronics Engineering, we created a laser cut tank with the Lego EV3 kit (this was required) that shot Nerf balls, all to achieve a very special purpose: to remove the geese from the University of Waterloo campus.
There are lots of pictures of the tank below, and our design reports are attached as well, but I would like to highlight something here as well. Before going further, I would also like to give credit to my amazing groupmates Caleb Dueck and Lukas Wormald. This project was truly a group effort, and I could not have asked for better groupmates.
The treads are made out of laser cut 3mm MDF board. Using cutting a flexible pattern in to the wood, we were able to create a fully functioning tread. We attached both ends of the tread using 18AWG wire loops soldered through holes in the ends of the treads. The gears were made from This may not have been the best option for the treads, but it worked fairly well and was easy to do. The treads were not durable in the wet weather outside and one of them broke as it got wet and soggy.
The ball hopper mechanism was inspired by the design of paintball hoppers, and laser cut out of 3mm MDF. It worked very well at slow speeds, and was very repeatable. The top cover is attached with magnets and is removable in order to reload the hopper.
If we were given more time and resources, we would like to have made the balls fire faster and further using compressed air instead of a spring. However, the spring powered solution worked fairly well after some tuning, but would not fire as straight or as far as was originally planned for.
Using the Lego EV3 Robot kit was a requirement for this project, driven by the school, as these kits are easy to debug. If we were given more time and more freedom, we would have used an Arduino based platform instead, as this gives more expandability, power, and features.
The design report that we produced covering all the design decisions that were made is available here.
Videos of the robot in action can be found here.
Project By: Micah Black, Caleb Dueck, Lukas Wormald
Written By: Micah Black
