Roboclub's 2024-2025 Year

After abruptly realizing that Roboclub is now 40 years old, we've decided to make it mandatory to write down the happenings each year, so we can know what the club has been up to over time.

The 24-25 year was marked by a lot of growth in many of our projects, in part due to excellent improvements in outreach and advertising on many fronts.

New Hype Video

Our current club architect, Teddy, put together a brand-new hype video showcasing many of Roboclub's new projects!

40th Anniversary

Photo of all 40th anniversary attendees

To celebrate the club's continued existence for much longer than anyone expected, we held a big celebration for the 40th anniversary of our inaugural meeting on September 13th of 1984, featuring cake, snacks, club tours, and live robot fights from the Combat Robotics project.

Red Robot Hackathon

Red Robot 2024 Logo

This year's theme was Bread Robot: a race to see who can cook up the finest delicacies the fastest. The beautiful logo above was provided by our current Campus PR officer, Justin.

Using magnetically-attached, stackable ingredients, teams prepared and served dishes as quickly as possible. Points were rewarded for unique combinations of ingredients, and by using ingredients cooked by placing them on an oven conveyor belt. For more details, see the game manual.

Couchbot

As part of showing off at Carnival, Roboclub has now put together v3 (or possibly v4 or v5) of Couchbot. The 6-week project was lead by current root Mehul.

It features more horsepower, more structural integrity, and greater stability than the previous revision. Features include:

Planned features include Mario-Kart-style Wii Wheel control, dropping casters for sideways locomotion, and custom upholstery for maximum comfort.

Doghouse

The Doghouse build team A well-earned award for Doghouse

For the first time in our memory (maybe ever?), Roboclub participated in Booth this year, in the doghouse category! For the Booth theme of "Hollywood", we decided to create a doghouse themed around the Iron Giant. The booth build team did an amazing job and we were voted 2nd place for the doghouse category at the Booth and Buggy awards!

RoboBuggy

Two fully-autonomous buggies rolled at Carnival Race Day 2025.

Combat Robotics

A live demo at the 40th anniversary

Quintupling in size from last year, the Combat Robotics project now boasts nearly 40 active members, all involved in robot-on-robot destruction. Their full list of robots now includes:

3 pound

12 pound

30 pound

Quadrupeds

The Quadrupeds project made great progress this year! We iterated through many leg and body designs for our robot and manufactured one nearly complete leg for testing. We also developed our novel gearbox design over many iterations and tested many of them to destruction with our final iterations performing incredibly well through our series of tests. The gearbox tests demonstrated our ability to manufacture almost all of the needed parts in our shop and our design's ability to withstand substantial use with no breakage and minimal wear. Once we have multiple gearboxes tested, we will move to building and testing our complete leg prototype. On the software side, we have been able to setup a Gazebo simulation and ROS environment to begin writing our control software and verify our mechanical design. This simulation environment will enable us to verify the joint load estimates calculated for different robot weights as well as write the complete software stack before having the real robot.

Fun with Robots

Fun With Robots continues to be a space where all can learn about robotics, boasting a class range in the S25 semester from first year undergrads to staff members. Many students came in not expecting to own the robot that they worked with once the course ended, and they showed much excitement about being able to further experiment with it on their own with what they had learned.

With the torch of instructorbeing passed onto two highly motivated rising seniors, Matthew Kibarian and Nick Yaeger, we expect the course's level of engagement as well as the interest students at CMU have in FWR to greatly increase as they revamp the labs to further cater to today's generation in both hardware and content.

Build Your Own Breadboard Computer

98-341 had its fourth successful semester with 11 students! The course migrated to a new course website to make the materials more publicly available and maintainable. The current (and graduating) instructor is handing the course off to Sky to keep the course going for a new round of computer builders.

RoboOrchestra

This semester, we've improved our ability to play along with humans. We've further developed our Bayes filter code to incorporate pitch detection, making it possible to identify and follow specific notes in a melody line rather than just noticing that there was a note. (For example, in "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", the melody is mostly just quarter notes, but on different pitches, so being able to track those is helpful.) We've also recently added the ability to detect specific conducting patterns (we were previously able to detect beats but did not know which beats those were). In the very short term, we're looking for ideas for demos we can do with this, and hoping to recruit new people for next year (I'm hopefully graduating this summer, leaving Ryan the only person left on the project). Our longer-term goals next year very much depend on the interests of whatever new people join the project.

Prosthetics

The Prosthetics Project is working to create an affordable and easily repairable prosthetic hand.

This year we started our hand design from scratch, given certain limitations of the original hand. We separated each phalange of the finger to allow each phalange to move independently, giving the hand greater dexterity, as well as changing the finger joints to reduce the risk of breaking. By the end of this semester, we have designed the entire hand, with room to implant servo motors and other electronics. For software we set up a simulation environment for the hand in Gazebo. As for hardware, we have been working on controls for motor drivers and actuating fingers from tendons.

SHRG

Small Helpful Reserach Grants (SHRG) is how the robotics club funds smaller scale projects that are people's personal interests. We funded over 5 different projects this semester, including a newspaper folding machine, a pipette pulling machine, a 6502 based RPN calculator, and a BB8!

Here are some updates from the BB8 project: Since last summer we have established the scope of our project, finalized a design for the internal robot, researched materials and electronics, and purchased all of the materials for our project, including an 18” diameter acrylic sphere. More recently we are near the end of our manufacturing and assembly of the robot and have completed the initial wiring and programming. Now we are designing some 3d printed parts to close the sphere and house our arduino and other electronics. Over the summer we plan to finish building the head of the robot and work on some autonomous driving and other functions.