The Climbing Dutchman

The senior design project for ENGS 452 in the spring of 2005 was to enter a robot into the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) regional design contest. The goal of the contest was to transport the largest amount of rice possible in a ten minute period using a bulk transporter robot designed and created by student engineers. The device had to climb three four-inch stairs while fully loaded with rice, at the top of the third stair, the robot needed to make a 90-degree turn, then go down one four-inch stair and finally dump the transported rice into a box. This process was repeated as many times as possible in a ten-minute allotted time period.

Our Senior Design Class at Hope College consisted of Christopher Lininger, Jericho Moll, Peter Rusche, and Nathan Sprik. We started designing our robot in January of 2005. We began by examining toys that were designed for children. Next using Legos, we were able to model many of our original conceptual designs. We decided to use two tank treads (one on each side of the robot) that could move in the same and opposing directions at the same speed. This allowed for ease in driving, and quick, smooth turns. We also made the decision to build a chassis out of laser cut steel plates that were held together using several pieces of threaded rod. The rice was carried by a hopper which took up the entire back portion of the robot. In the rear of the robot, under the hopper, a linear actuator was installed to lift the back end of the device up while climbing the stairs. The robot was controlled by a 4-channel radio control device.

The regional competition was held on April 2, 2005 in Morgantown , West Virginia . While at the contest, we were able to be present as other teams competed. We were also able to evaluate our design based on some of the ideas other teams had come up with. The winning team had a design that was much different from ours. They had a larger hopper, and a drive system that worked like an elevator. This robot was able to transport much more rice than many of the other devices. Our robot, The Climbing Dutchman, finished in sixth place out of nineteen teams. One unexpected problem arose due to the course at the regional competition being painted; this made the friction between our treads and the steps much less than we had anticipated. Due to this, our robot did not climb as well as expected.

We found that we had underestimated the competition's ability to transport large quantities of rice. Also, we learned that focusing on the drive system was a wonderful way to make sure we had a smoothly traveling robot, but it left us with a robot that was extremely heavy, and did not transport very much rice. Overall, the robot was a success, it performed exactly as it had been designed to do.