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Sixth Sense Design Challenge : Winners Announcement

Sixth Sense Design Challenge: Winners Announcement

After 11+ weeks of designing, researching, prototyping, coding and testing, our Sixth Sense Design Challenge has come to a close.

Our challengers were asked to build an autonomous vehicle with a sixth sense using the STMicroelectronics SensorTile and TE Connectivity sensors.

The judges have tallied up their thoughts and feedback for all 10 challengers, and they have finalized the grand prize and runner up winners, as well as the finishers.

 

We are very pleased to congratulate all the winners of the Sixth Sense Design Challenge, as well as all of its participants!

 

The Winners:

 

Grand Prize

's Graffiti Bot

Project Summary

 

(It says E14 if you squint hard enough!)

 

 

Douglas created an autonomous robot that produces a liquid canvas drawing. The project involves mechanical, electronics, software, and hydraulic design. See all blogs.

 

Runner Up

’s R2B4 Bot

Project Summary

 

 

Rod wanted to help those working in construction by creating a robot to haul materials like sand or gravel to act as a project assistant.  He made his own PCB to host the TE Magnet sensor so that it would be board mountable. See all blogs.

 

Other Finisher

's Automatic Weeding Robot.

Although this project is unfinished, we loved the novel approach to weeding and even building a (very dangerous looking) Motorized Scissors rig to manage our yards. Project Summary

Anonymous
  • in reply to genebren

    Thank you everybody for the support too

    now still have the desire to make my unfinished bot able to conquer its yard one day

  • Congrats to everyone especially the winners. Great projects.

  • Congratulations to the winners and finisher . This competition really was a tough one. Great work done.

  • Congratulations to everyone, was really interesting to follow all of the projects!

     

    Milos

  • in reply to e14phil

    Hi Phil,

    True, the very difficulty IMHO was finding an original idea.

     

    Enrico

  • It certainly was one of the harder challenges we have ever set, Thank you for persisting and being inventive.

     

    Phil

  • in reply to 14rhb

    Thank you for the details Rod, I should admit that the effect was incredibly similar. I have in plan to try to make some sort of 3D printed omniwheel but I am far from having a satisfying solution with a good and efficient design. Maybe I should try to buy some and see exactly how these are built.

     

    BTW, don't underestimate your wooden craft, 3D printing is just a trend but a – surely valid – alternative. Still exists plenty of methods and sometimes the compulsion of 3D print everything is not the better solution at all.

     

    Enrico

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    Hi Enrico,

     

    Great to hear from you, thank you. Unfortunately the wheels are not high-tech 3D printed as they might appear. They are the same wooden wheels I manufactured at the start of the project. I had initially added some strips of 2mm thick foam rubber (red in colour) to (1) expand the diameter slightly (2) and to improve grip. However that foam completely lacked grip.

     

    Towards the end of the project the robot was still missing grip and so I glued additional strips (the black mesh) onto the wheels. These were from a roll of material used for lining toolboxes and desk surfaces to stop things slipping around. People also use the material on car dashboards for the same reason. It is not physically 'wet/sticky' but does have a high grip to it. It looks like this:

    The project made me think a lot about my physics lessons back at school (and believe me that was a long time ago). I would like to find time to actually do some experiments with friction of different materials, wheel diameters and loading.

     

    Rod

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    It was definitely much harder back in those days. It would not have been possible to attempt this project in a reasonable time frame. I used to make mobile computers with DEC LSI11 computers, programmed in Macro and Fortrran, (way back in the dark ages) but a robot based on them would look more like a big lawn mower and run from a car battery.

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    As above, I loved this project as I saw your first posts. There is also a historical reason; during the mid of '80s I worked for a couple of years in an Italian company R&D Dept developing the firmware for big (almost of the size of your robot) printing head to sign with a barcode along the production line the previous approval or not automated test results. In that time, there was nothing like today and I remember the development of the Windows for Workgroup industrial for embedded machines creating the UI in pure C to communicate with the hardware in pure 386 assembler language. I have an idea of what does it means to sync the movements with the ink ejection on the move... ALl my respect.

     

    Also, the second (but is there a "second" in this kind of projects?) robot by   sounds an exciting idea. In the blog, final videos you use a 3D printed omniwheel, is a custom design? I am curious to know more about its building. Another great piece of making full of creativity.

     

    Enrico