"Ninja Warrior" Robot

Introduction

This project was a term-long group project for a course I took at Oregon State titled "ME 382: Introduction to Design". The premise of the course was to teach and develop engineering project management skills. The project involved collection of customer requirements, working through a House of Quality, crowdsourcing concepts and ideas, forming Decision Matrices, and culminating all team decisions into a final design. The course also guided teams through the FMEA process, and the use of DFM/DFA principles in their designs. The robot was initially prototyped as a group of subsystems, then assembled, tested, revised, and tested once more. Once the robot was deemed "ready" by the team and the coaching staff, it was entered into an "American Ninja Warrior"-style obstacle course, in competition with the other teams and their machines. The course was an entertaining and collaborative introduction to project management and working as  part of a design team, and as a result of the project's time-intensive nature I formed lasting friendships with my teammates as well.

Developing a robot from scratch presented many challenges, but was foremost an excellent exercise in team problem-solving. Besides learning soft skills that aligned with the project, all members of our team got a chance to practice our machining skills too, as we produced many of the robot's components by hand. I personally designed and machined our robot's upper swingarm hinge, which was intended to support the full weight of the robot and house a servo which would actuate the arm. Photos of this process are included below!

Outcome & Conclusion

Our robot performed fairly well in competition, considering the extreme difficulty of the obstacle course. Along with most of the competing robots, ours was able to traverse all obstacles except the "boss level": crossing an open-air gap while hanging and propelling itself along a steel bar. Regardless, it was considered a major success to make it to competition with a working robot at all (given our time and resource constraints), so our team was still very happy with the end result! Below is the final CAD model, and a photo depicting the final assembled robot. At the bottom of this page is my team's final "Technical Portfolio Entry" report, submitted at the end of the course following the Ninja Warrior competition. Although arduous, this project was easily one of the highlights of my college education. Thank you for reading!