What is POE?
POE stands for Principles of Engineering and is a class taught at Olin College which teaches students to integrate analysis, qualitative design, quantitative optimization, experiments and simulations in real systems. During the course of the semester, we learned important skills such as mechanical design, integrating firmware and software with a mechanical and electrical system, and using various tools for fabrication of real-life systems.
These are some of the labs that we have done in POE prior to our final project. Both projects require the integration of a mechanical, electrical and computer system.
What is Water Pong
Water pong is a game that is akin to Beer Pong where there are two teams comprised of two members each, who shoot two balls into a rack of cups filled with water on the other end of the table. The main goal is to make every cup on the opposing side before the opposition makes every cup on your side. During the game, each team receives two re-racks where they are able to change the alignment of the cups.
What is a Pong Bot?
Pong bot is a robot that we have created to play alongside a human player in a game of water pong and help the user win. In order to create this robot, we organized our teams into 3 subteams: Mechanical, Electrical and Computer. The computer team utilized an imaging software called OpenCV to track the position of the cups, relative to a known object and coded in Matlab to obtain results. The mechanical team researched various launcher systems including pulley systems, spring loaded systems, solenoid launching system and after recommendation by our professors decided upon a mechanism inspired by a baseball pitching system. The electrical system researched various motors and functions that we wanted for our robot and came to a conclusion that we wanted a pan mechanism along with a linear actuator system which will push the ball up to our release system. The final decision was to utilize 1 geared DC motor for our linear actuator, 2 ungeared DC motors for our release system, and 1 stepper motor for the pan function.
Our End Goal
The goal of our final project is to create a water pong robot system that can accurately launch ping pong balls in a desired cup and consistently do this into all the different cups. We hope that with a high enough accuracy, this robot can outperform a human and be the ultimate companion in the game of water pong. From POE, we all learned of how to integrate a mechanical, electrical and computer system into one final working product and have enjoyed the entire process of making the Pong Bot
Why We Chose to Make a Pong Bot?
"I decided to do this was because we each enjoy this game due to the amount of skill it takes to win. " - Kevin Suzuki
"I was really interested in precise ballistic systems, since they can be applied to a multitude of complex problems, like the Iron Dome." - Maor Bernstein
"I enjoy complicated mechanical and electrical integration problem, and this looked to be a good challenge!" - Jacob Riedel
"Because I am not good at (water) pong, I needed an assistant" -Bonjun Gu
"I am an exchange student and I am interested in learning more about the American Culture, including this game" - Felix Klinger
"I was really interested in precise ballistic systems, since they can be applied to a multitude of complex problems, like the Iron Dome." - Maor Bernstein
"I enjoy complicated mechanical and electrical integration problem, and this looked to be a good challenge!" - Jacob Riedel
"Because I am not good at (water) pong, I needed an assistant" -Bonjun Gu
"I am an exchange student and I am interested in learning more about the American Culture, including this game" - Felix Klinger
PONG BOT SYSTEM DIAGRAM
