Robotics Capstone: Staircase Climbing+Cleaning

Skills: Systems Engineering, SolidWorks, Machining

For our senior Robotics capstone, teams of three were given a budget of $2500 to develop a robotic system comprising of mechanical, electrical, and software features from initial idea conception to final implementation.

Team Members:

Andrew Yang
Angela Zheng

For this project, we spent the Fall 2020 semester developing system engineering requirements through a requirements management plan. This included creating design specifications, an objective tree, a requirements traceability matrix, verification and validation tests, and other conditions that our final product should meet. Some examples of requirements we had include being able to traverse stairs in a reasonable amount of time, being non intrusive to the individuals in the surroundings, and operating to clean a set number of stairs on a single battery charge.

My main contributions to this project were the CAD designs of the robot and the final mechanical build, especially for the machining and assembly of the drive base. All team members worked together to develop the components of the systems engineering document detailing our robot.

Here we have the drive base of the robot, which I designed to allow the robot to move in any of the four cardinal directions relative to the orientation of the robots body. For this drive base, I had to figure out how to exactly align all of our components together in such a way that they didn’t interfere with each others motions. To do so, I designed custom brackets that would allow our motors to be placed within the drive base while having all of the gears mesh properly, ensuring that the robot would also be able to move smoothly.

This video demonstrates the motion of our robot during our demo day. The two climbers are used to stabilize and support the robot as it traverses up, down, and across the stairs to clean them. Given more time, some features we would have liked to implement are guide rails for the climbers to mitigate their stress and deflection relative to the body, as well as developing full autonomy for the full cleaning process.