Robotic Football

To accelerate innovation in robotics, the Notre Dame University plans to create an intercollegiate mechatronic football league; the teams in the league compete against each other in robot football games. The first game was successfully organized and reported as a featured story by many influential media such as USA Today and NFL. The next step for Notre Dame University is to promote this league to a national level. With the sponsorship of Notre Dame University, our Senior Design group has successfully built a football-playing robot team and participated in a game between our school and IUPUI held in Notre Dame stadium. The goal of this senior design project is to build a football-playing robot team that will be competing in the Intercollegiate Mechatronic Football game at University of Notre Dame in April, 2013. Due to time constrain and limited team size, only three different robots of a complete robotic team are built. The selected robots are the quarterback, receiver, and center. As an option of advancement, the design includes a tracking and positioning system as an autonomous ball launching mechanism from quarterback to receiver. The robots’ design has multiple requirements that were definite in the Rules and Regulations of Collegiate Mechatronic Football and others were gathered from different prospective. One of the most important requirements specifies each player’s weight and dimensions. In fact, players must fit within a 16x16x24 inch box, and cannot weigh more than 30 pounds with an exception for the quarterback who can weigh up to 45 pounds. If these conditions are not met, the project would be a failure. In order for the project to be successful, the robots must be able to travel at a high speed, pass the ball from center to quarterback reliably, and pass the ball from quarterback to receiver reliably as well. The quantitative numbers that the team put together as goals for the project are a speed of 10 ft/sec for all robots, delivering operation from center to quarterback within 20 seconds with a success rate of 75%, success rate of 65% for complete passes, and ability of receiver to navigate through 5 cones placed 6 feet apart covering a linear distance of 30 feet in less than 10 seconds. The final requirement and constrain of the project is cost. The sponsor has given a budget of $5,000 and IEEE has given a grant of $500 for a total of $5,500