Pellet Dispensing Competition is Over!

The Pellet Dispensing Competition ended yesterday; what a great competition! It was a lot of fun designing a robot to work in a real factory with non-LEGO elements. You can see a couple videos of my robot below:

An overview of the robot:

A short test run of the robot dispensing 241 pellets. Notice that, if you divide the video's time (159.65 seconds) by the number of pellets dispensed, you find that the average time per drop is .662 seconds; only 4 thousandths of a second off!

-Jonathan

Comments

Rick Rhodes said…
EXCELLENT videos, Jonathan!

And "Pellet Picker" wins the contest for best-named robot. :)
I cannot wait to see all the different entries! This one is very well done, Jonathan - I like the upfront information about the number if missed pellets out of 400.

Was the container provided by Dan? Just curious because your design seems to rely on that particular round container.

Nice work!

Jim
Anonymous said…
Don't you think WIRE-ME is a better name? :P
mindstormskid,

Nice video! And the music is a nice match. You've got some great video editing skills there!

Good luck!

Jim
@Rick: Lol... it took me a while to think of a name; I was trying to decide between names like "Pellet Popper", "Pellet Pumper" and stuff like that. :P

@Jim: Yes, Dan sent the container and pellets. That container is the one he preferred for robots to use.

-Jonathan
Parax said…
Peter Piper picked a purple pellet picker...


Nice machine but at present I would not call it a robot, have you thought about making it more intelligent?

you could drop into another disc to split multi-pick.. then verify your pellets by passing the hole under a light sensor before its dropped to check it has not missed one (speed up if it has) and
Im sure you could use less power, but detect if its stuck (stall) then jiggle free, (maybe backup and poke free? with axle - clears odd shaped pellets) and if all else fails use power.

Good work though.

P.
Lol... actually, that was the point of this robot; it's very simple, and yet it works very well. Making it more complicated would probably make it less durable, shorten its lifespan (due to more demands on the NXT brick and motors), and make it more prone to bugs. Besides that, I can't really make it much more complex anyway because of my parts limit; that robot already uses just about every straight beam in the retail kit!

-Jonathan
Anonymous said…
this is comming from a participant of this contestbut... i love this design. mine uses two motors (which is not terrible) but i really like the one motor aspect of that design. my only question is this... how do you change out the pellets when you need to? anyway, great work.
Taylor
Hi Taylor,

Removing a container is similar to loading one; you open the gate, flip the robot upside down, and take the container out. Then you can load a new container.

-Jonathan
Anonymous said…
a very nice system
Taylor
Unknown said…
Is there any information available to what extent the company that is using that robot now will benefit economically from it?

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