MuTanClan

Founded in 2013 under EFC, MuTanClan was the fourth MRDC team every created by iRobotics. In it's first year, it was only somewhat a part of iRobotics since it got some of its funding through the engineering freshman council (EFC) though this policy was stopped at the conclusion of MuTan's freshman season. Overall MuTan operated in four separate MRDC competitions, and achieved it's greatest victory sophomore year where it took home second place, runner up only to the senior iRobotics team "BroBots". During its years in the club, MuTan pioneered a technique of "Design without CAD", dual microcomputer robot control, on-board audio systems, custom PCB micro-controllers, water-jet frames, LiPo Battery power systems, and a fully brushless drivetrain.

Freshman Year (2013 - 2014)

File:MuTan MRDC Freshman.jpg

Freshman year robot with team

Freshman year was an interesting year for MuTan. MuTan was the forth MRDC team to join iRobotics and represented the first time in its history that we had a full stack of teams from Senior all the way to Freshman. This year, EFC funding the MuTan budget, and gave us work space in Engineering Hall. In order to streamline our build process, we purchased a frame kit from AndyMark, and then built our robot on top of that using the left over parts in Engineering Hall. This proved to be especially helpful as the ESPL was in a state of flux over who was running it, with the current shop managers Peet and Morey not managing the machine shop properly. Our robot competed in the 2014 MRDC game, and placed in the middle of the pack, managing to pick up a few cones and place them on a few pegs.

Overall it was a good year for our team, though we had many things which we wanted to improve. The Sasquatch motor controller was useful to getting the robot off the ground quickly, but using a router to control our robot was less than ideal, and we wished to switch to something more robust the following year. Not using CAD to design the robot was a huge drawback as well. During the year, we had had a design team which instead of designing was lagging behind the mechanical team, and thus was not of use when building the robot. The following year we planned to design the robot prior to construction, and reformatted the team to bring the mechanical and design teams into a single entity.

Sophomore Year (2014 - 2015)

This year muTan decided to go with a welded tube frame. We also reformulated our team structure so that we would be able to CAD our designs prior to implementation, and so that the programming and electrical sub-teams would be more interlinked given that their jobs are so intertwined. We also realized that many problems could arrive if with did not complete our mechanical build on time, since the electrical team will need ample time to create actual electrical system as well as debug the wiring. We also decided to adopt the "jump drive" style drive train, it worked well for EVO the year before, and we wanted to try out hand at it.

We ended up getting second place, only to the iRobotics senior team Brobots,was This was achieved not without some setbacks though. The build took much longer that anticipated, as the tube frame was difficult to weld together and prevent warping, and the tube jump modules were much harder to create, since the design did not allow them to be jigged into position easily. This led to us attempting to us the "Sasquatch" robot controller, as referenced above, which broke down and failed completely the night before the competition. The electronics captains worked for almost a day straight to get the beaglebone microcontrollers functional. We could not get more than 4 PWM signals to work on the beaglebones, so we used a second beaglebone, which we talked to via console commands, to control non-drivetrain components. Overall it ended up being just barely functional enough to net us second place, we even feel that with a few more days of electrical time, we could have taken the win based on our design being the most efficient by far, since we were corralling the golf balls under our robot to avoid the "cant pick up more than one golf ball at a time rule".

Junior Year (2015 - 2016)

Junior year MuTan was determined to come out swinging, learn from the mistakes of last year, and attempt to go for the gold. Team structures remained more stable, but Matt and Eric fully took over the rolls as programming and electronics leads. Eric also fleshed out and expanded the BigPapa Driver Station, creating the layout in XAML and creating a professional looking driver's station for anybody to build. Mechanically, MuTan went to great effort to reduce the amount of machining errors in building it's drivetrain. To achieve this, MuTan waterjet many of the drive train components, and used a boring bar to get the press fit bearing properly seated in the frame prior to welding. Choosing again to do a welded tube frame for the second year in a row, they were able to keep the frames tolerance stack-up to a minimum, and the frame maintained its dimensions to within a 1/16th of an inch.

Unfortunately this year, using the Beaglebone and multi-threaded code proved to be a bad idea, with the team's robot suffering from power brown outs leading to instability in the comms system. One issue that constantly plagued MuTan was that the beaglebones would not start up properly, requiring them to reconnect to the robot in the event that the beaglebone restarts. This lead to the brown outs turning into catastrophic failures. The robot did not make it far into the elimination round, since every time Collin would accelerate fast or turn quickly, the comms system would shut down resulting in a disabled robot.

Senior Year (2016 - 2017)

For it's swan song year, MuTan made the decision to completely overhaul the ways they had been creating the electronics harnesses and drive trains. They decided to push MRDC robotics to the next level and introduce the first ever brushless drive train at the competition. Illinihilation, led by Nick Jew, also followed suit and soon the upperclassmen where constructing drive trains that were absolute monsters. Each jump drive module was powered by a Turnigy TrakStar 2300W Inrunner motor, providing 3HP per wheel, 12HP in total. They also dumped lead acid batteries in totality, instead choosing a 20AH 4s LiPo pack from Turnigy. They also completely isolated the electronics power system, running it on seperate 2S LiPo battery packs. In order to create the perfect microcomputer, MuTan custom designed a dual chip PCB, using two ATMEGA 328's. This was done to reduce the amount of workload on one chip, and to make programming tasks in real time easier. The custom MCU Board was also helpful since it had headers specifically laid out for each electronic component, removing the need for a perfboard cape. Additionally, they upgraded to XBee Pro modules, which provided a more powerful antenna, leading to almost perfect comms between the host computer and the robot. They also waterjet a huge percentage of the robot's frame, which resulted in a beautiful robot and a build quality that had not been seen before at MRDC.

Here is a link to the build log.

MuTan finished in the middle of the pack during the