Miner Rescue Challenge
This challenge required my partner and me to build a robot capable of saving a person trapped in a mine shaft. A small person was placed at the bottom of a tube. A platform was placed around the rim of the tube as our robot's work area. The only restriction on this challenge was a maximum of three motors.
First Design
We built a rig that incorporated our old robot car's axels as a mechanism that would reel up string. Attached to this string was a motor that turned gears to close the bottom platforms after the man was between the two platforms. Unfortunately the string reeled up and down in an unpredictable manner. This made it impossible to center the man between the two platforms.
Second Design
We replaced the car with two motors rotating a single axel in hopes of being able to reel up the string more evenly. The string continued to reel down in an unpredictable manner. The new motors we used were also too weak to power our rig. This caused our platform rig to lower to quickly. The two new motors did not have the torque required to reel the platform rig back up.
Third Design
For our third attempt we used a completely new idea. The two motors lowered a rig over the man, which would catch him by forcing him between two platforms that were tight enough to hold him in. The motors used chain to reel the rig up and down. The rig lowered perfectly but the motors did not always have enough power to pull the rig back up.
Final Modifications
To modify our design we added two hooks to the back end of the chain and attached two large wheels to the two hooks. This counterweight pulled back at the chain after the rig was lowered giving it another force pulling the chain and reeling up the rig. This design successfully rescued the miner from the mine shaft.
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