I did a fair amount of high-school and college robotic competitions (The college experience focused on autonomous underwater vehicles at AUV-AUVSI competitions).
It's a very cool way to get hands on experience across a wide number of technical disciplines.
I found the write-up was good, I especially loved the focus on what went wrong and the last minute fixes (They're unavoidable at competitions like this - nothing like rebuilding critical parts at midnight, or scrambling to fix a bug in the 20 minutes you have between runs).
That said - I'd really have liked a cost breakdown of this bot. Just eye-balling some of the components here, I'm guessing we're around 10k, but it can vary a ton, and I'm about a decade out on pricing.
Some of the teams at the competitions I participated in went in with budgets in the low hundreds of thousands (University of Central Florida pretty consistently spent ~75k a year on their hardware, not counting travel or other expenses) and some went in with complete shoe-string budgets in the 5k range.
I'd love to get an idea of what budget was planned for this, what ended up being more expensive, and what ended up being less.
Your guess is pretty much on point: Total BOM was around 16k€.
A not insubstantial amount (for me) and entirely financed out of my own pocket -
107-systems is a private team staffed with volunteers financed by donations.
I'd preferred to stay below 10k but at the end it was do or die ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Since you write of having participated at such events I suppose you understand ;)
The most expensive parts were the miniature hydraulics as well as the custom CNC milled parts, which were created using a service for the manufacturing of custom front panels (a plate is a plate). But also all the small parts start to add up: cables, connectors, batteries, power distributors, ...
> The most expensive parts were the miniature hydraulics as well as the custom CNC milled parts
Had you considered using laser cut parts from a place like SendCutSend? Conservatively guessing approximately $300 in cut parts if using 6061 aluminum.
Including the coating, deburring, secondary machining, and German cost of living and materials, I imagine the price of the plate set must have been more.
Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to mill these, they should really water jet or laser. Does SendCutSend have a water jet? Do they ship overseas? What would the air freight cost on that large package?
Those machined shafts would have been expensive. Nice to get them for free.
> But also all the small parts start to add up: cables, connectors, batteries, power distributors, ...
This sure is the truth... I am painfully familiar with realizing I've spent another grand at McMaster-Carr by the end of the month with a series of small purchases, each under 50 bucks individually.
The big ticket items tend to be expensive, but expensive once. It's all the nickel and dime purchases in between that can really hurt.
As someone with an EE background, it surprised me that something with such a meticulous mechanical design had a comparatively amateurish set of electronics that seemed to be cobbled together out of a mix of hobbyist parts.
At day 0, they could likely have found an SBC with native CAN and RS-485 (or just used a UART to 485 converter), and enough USB ports for the sensors, which would have simplified the design a lot. A different battery controller or a few capacitors likely could have managed the "power surges" as well.
A lot of robotics projects like this are done by people who only have a background in mechanical engineering. This team seems to have dedicated software people so they can use ROS (Python/C++). However it's common in robotics to just draw something in Simulink/Stateflow that is pushed to the microcontroller or FPGA. No low-level C expert required.
I'm sure most software people will be horrified how much "safety critical software" in modern cars and aircrafs is autogenerated based on something drawn up in Simulink/Stateflow.
I think companies that do actual life/death safety critical software should hire dedicated software people instead of relying on closed-source proprietary visual programming tools for mechanical engineers.
Simulink / Stateflow and more generally 'synchronous programming languages' have a rich academic lineage and are particularly well adapted to safety-critical tasks.
These languages bring a lot of key guarantees that you can't (easily) get from more classical languages like bounded memory usage, hard real time guarantees, numerical properties, ability to prove theoretical properties about the model etc...
It's also not like having your code written as a text file would save you from using closed source proprietary compilers or languages (Ada, Ferrocene, various C distributions) for safety-critical software.
Rather than "instead" it can be both. I don't want mechanical engineers hand writing observer models and PIDs in bare metal C, but I also don't want software engineerings designing my observer models and PIDs. They are different tools for different jobs.
There are 3 large fields IMHO to make a robot like this: hardware, electronics and software. Same for a large range of hobby-robotics like rc planes, legged dogs, etc. It's VERY difficult to be an expert in all of those, like being an expert in only one of those is already a lifetime career if you want, let alone two or even three. Oh and also, in any of them to make a robot like this would also be specialized, e.g. in software you'd need to know quite a lot about inverse kinematics, rigid body mechanics, PIDs, etc.
But the nice thing of 6-legged robots and such, is that to make them at the "hobby" level you don't even need to be an expert in those fields; knowing one well and then the basics of the other two is enough to follow tutorials and build it! And it's also a lot of fun and I'd recommend anyone with a small interest to try it. I created one of those with a couple of friends, in a much rougher way (but it worked!) in a couple of days.
I can confirm that at the mechanical hardware level you'd also typically have specializations. At the very least I'd see one design engineer (CAD, designing parts for manufacturability, selecting COTS systems based on requirements) and a controls engineer (simulating and analyzing kinematics and dynamics of moving parts and setting up the controls algorithms to be used).
One jack-of-all trades engineer could for sure do both, but in larger projects with high budget (BD, NASA rovers, etc), you'd have even more different specializations just in mechanical engineering: thermals, structural analysts, motorization experts, etc.
I'm very interested in such a project. Is there some online lectures, books or other resources wher you could learn to build a robot like this on a good level (both mechanical and electronics)?
Just curious if it can be learned online or you rather need to join a company to get the basics.
PS: I'm asking because for example in Software that was a really amazing exprience, to learn in a team. Although I had a good background. Don't think the knowledge can be learned from books or from some tutorials.
I've interviewed at quite a few startups where the hardware was a raspberry pi/jetson strapped to some 80/20. Whether they fix the mechanical design or EE side first usually depends on whether they need to ship and go "shit this 80/20 is expensive" or hit power issues/USB enumeration nightmares on important sensors.
A step further, I probably would have used something not running a GPOS for the main computer. Depending on the details, probably used an STM32H7 etc, and either run most of the logic on it, or delegated to other MCUs as-required for specific tasks like servo control.
A lot of embedded processors and SBCs other than the RPi have both a general-purpose computing environment and a real-time environment. Usually, the general-purpose environment is the main system, and it boots up the real-time system when required. I don't think any of them are nearly as convenient as using Python on Linux, though.
It's hard to fault them for reaching for a powerful core when they have the kitchen sink worth of high-bandwidth sensors on the thing, including 4 cameras and a LIDAR.
I stumbled on this video that might be interesting to you if you're in this comment section, these guys spent a year and a half trying to build a huge hexapod that could carry a human: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd8dKY6Ozrg
I was heavily involved in a robotics project in college, it was my entry into software (and, the most fun I've ever had writing software!).
I really miss it. Reading this made me jealous of these guys, they look like they are having a lot of fun. I wonder: is it possible to do a competition like this for fun, somewhere in the US? Is anyone working on something like this purely on a recreational basis? Is there some kind of club I can join? I know about student competitions e.g. AUVSI but I'm not allowed to do those without academic status.
RIP Intel RealSense. You were a great stereo camera for quick prototyping and development and it is a huge shame that you have been discontinued. Is there anything else on the market that has the same sort of capabilities?
It's a very cool way to get hands on experience across a wide number of technical disciplines.
I found the write-up was good, I especially loved the focus on what went wrong and the last minute fixes (They're unavoidable at competitions like this - nothing like rebuilding critical parts at midnight, or scrambling to fix a bug in the 20 minutes you have between runs).
That said - I'd really have liked a cost breakdown of this bot. Just eye-balling some of the components here, I'm guessing we're around 10k, but it can vary a ton, and I'm about a decade out on pricing.
Some of the teams at the competitions I participated in went in with budgets in the low hundreds of thousands (University of Central Florida pretty consistently spent ~75k a year on their hardware, not counting travel or other expenses) and some went in with complete shoe-string budgets in the 5k range.
I'd love to get an idea of what budget was planned for this, what ended up being more expensive, and what ended up being less.