Development of Educational Mobile Soccer Platform Teaching Mechanical Design and Fabrication for Mechanical Engineering

The mobile platform is an attractive educational tool that has brought to a lot of effective benefits for a variety of application fields, such as agriculture, medical and marine. Furthermore, introducing and applying the mobile platform has greatly assisted the engineering students’ firsthand experiences in college. For instance, the application of mobile robots inspired the ingenuity of students beyond operating a robot and enhanced problem-solving ability. Most of the robotics application classes offered today, however, are concentrating on mechatronics and software education. For the advancement, this paper developed the mobile platform for the effective curriculum in teaching design and fabrication of robot in-house. Besides, this robot platform is then used to participate in Robocup Soccer’s Small Size League (SSL). The proposed mobile platform was designed based on the knowledge of the majors subject from mechanical engineering and the components of the robot were fabricated by using the CNC machine. Platform hardware comprises of three floors; acting floor (bottom), assisting control floor (middle), and main control floor (top). The acting floor consists of moving, dribbling and shooting systems with the knowledge of both dynamics and kinematics of the holonomic system related to the fundamental design of the mobile platform. Electronics devices, such as camera and ultrasonic sensor, motor driver, and main controller compose the assisting control floor and main control floor. These middle and top floor helps to understand the relation between electronic and mechanical components. As the design constraints of the proposed platform should follow the rules of SSL competition, in which through the processes of designing and fabricating it will enhance the students’ comprehension in designing the robot system. The main controller of this platform based on the microcontroller unit (MCU), STM32F777VI, and it is used to control the acting components (moving, dribbling, and shooting), and it is supported by the Raspberry Pi and motor driver. These electronic components provide the opportunity for the student in the learning method of the embedded robotic system operation. Through the dynamic simulation and operation performance test, the mobile platform was verified in checking the possibility of an introduction to robotics education. Dynamic simulation experiments and real robot experiments with the maximum velocity and acceleration of this system were carried out to verify the application for educational purposes. Based on the criteria mentioned, the developed robot of this study can be implemented for two main classes, 1) design and fabrication class, and 2) robot application class based on the embedded system. For design and fabrication class, the studying of the developing process of this platform will be the reference as providing to the participating students. In the future, to verify the effectiveness of the suggested mobile soccer platform, it will apply to the newly developed curriculum as educational material.