UCL students competing in EUROBOT – Eurocircuits PCBs inside the BOTs.

THEIR STORY

We are a group of 28 students from the Université Catholique de Louvain, and we are currently following a Master’s in mechatronics.

Our study program includes an important project, which is to participate to an international robotic contest named Eurobot. In this contest, teams have to design and construct a small autonomous robot that can perform several actions, such as manipulating blocks and sorting them by color, or shooting ping-pong balls in a basket.

Although there are several specifications to fulfil (e.g., regarding the size of the robot or restrictions regarding its components), we also have a lot of freedom regarding the mechanisms embedded in the robot. Therefore, Eurobot is a nice opportunity to train our engineering skills in design and programming.

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We formed 5 teams of 5 to 6 students, and each team designed an original robot to take part in the contest.

Some of them are visible here.

Because the robot has to be autonomous, it contains many electrical parts.

There are actuators and sensors to perform the actions, CPUs to supervise them, and batteries.

We have designed specific electronic circuits to link these elements together.

Eurocircuits, gold sponsor of this project, played a key role in the manufacturing of the PCBs.

You can see the nice realization of these PCBs below.

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After the mechanical and electrical assembly of the robot, we proceeded to a long phase of tests and improvements.

The day of the Belgian competition finally arrived. Our work has been rewarded since one of our team became Vice-champion and got qualified for the European finals, held in France. Although very challenging, they managed to reach there the fourth place of the leaderboard!

Of course, the design of our robots was not perfect, but we have learnt a lot during this project. Creating a robot from scratch was an amazing experience and we will definitely recommend this study program to others.

Naturally, this project would not have been possible without the support of the teaching staff and the gold sponsors, including Eurocircuits.

You want to know more about our achievements? Watch our video stories here.

Center for Research in Mechatronics
Institute of Mechanics, Materials, and Civil Engineering
Place du Levant, 2 bte L5.04.02 B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve

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