How A Robot Solves a Rubik's Cube | Pioneer Robotics
43Welcome to the Rubik’s and Robotics STEM Course! Throughout this video we are going to be walking you through how this Rubik’s Cube Mosaic Robot works and the design process behind it! Hopefully after this video, you’ll become true engineers just like us!
So, the first step in our process was actually the prototyping phase. So before we could get to this monstrosity, we had to do a little bit of planning first. I know we tried to sandwich the cube in between wheels and try to turn it that way. We were also trying to use nails and screws and try to turn it that way. But in the end, both of those methods failed miserably! And if we had done no planning before hand, we would have absolutely no idea what we’re doing.
Next, we actually came up with a solution to turn the cube. We used these little pieces that we made ourselves. They would be attached to the axle attached to the motor which would turn the cube. And these are actually 3D Printed. We used something called CAD, or Computer Aided Design to design these parts. We call these pizza tables, because during our first iteration they looked just like pizza tables! We constantly improved these pizza tables, making really small tweaks that made a big difference. We changed the size of the piece and the sides to create the perfect pizza table!
Next is our frame. On a real robot, this is called the chassis, or the backbone of the robot. It holds all of your batteries, special motors, and anything else you need that is really essential to the robot. So, the chassis is usually made out of something really hard, like aluminum metal, or even wood. But, on our robot, we decided to use… Lego! Don’t leave the video yet! Lego still works well, let me tell you why! With Lego, you can easily put it together and take it apart. Now, you can easily maintain the robot, change the motors, and even make it really stylish.
And next are our motors. So, we use these blue and white motors that anyone can use! With a closer look you can see we have this circle. We can attach anything to this circle. And when the motor moves, anything attached to it also moves! And finally, we have the brick. So, the brick is kind of like the brain of the robot. It contains all of the programming and wiring. And with the brick, you can hook up some programming to any device - You can use your phone, your PC, a laptop, tablet, your thermometer (don’t quote me on that last one) - The brick is really powerful, and it’s what keeps this robot running!
We go through the proces of uploading the image of what we want. And in this case, we should use our own logo! We have a 10x10 square of cubes, and all we have to do now is create the mosaic. We go to another website and import the image we just got. It will provide us the algorithms we need. We can then just copy and paste this text into another program. Using the SPIKE Prime Software, we were able to create a complex program to be able to tell the robot the moves! First, lets start off with the variables of this program, which are count and string. We used the count variable to track the position of the string, and the string variable that contains the moves that the robot will do! Next, lets define our functions. There are two main functions in this program: one for turning the cube and one for telling the robot the moves to make. In this function (moving layer function), we used a “My Block” to make our program readable and not as janky. To put this function into simpler terms, you would put in the motor/side that you want to turn and for how many degrees. The other function is simple, it means that when you press this right button, it would do the moves on the robot! This program also uses a lot of if-else statements. If-else statements are statements that check a true or false statement, and completes the action that fits the case. LOOK AT ALL THESE IF-ELSE STATEMENTS!!!! This “Next” method tells the motors of the robot how far to turn and will tell this center color of the robot what side should be on the top for the mosaic.