Solving the FIRST LEGO League 2013 Natures Fury Code Construction - one motor, two movements Pro Preview

One of the most interesting challenges in the series of FLL Competitions. Move a block and add additional floor on top of the block without damaging the construction. In this tutorial we would focus only this mission and we would achieve two movements with only one motor which makes the attachment quite powerful.

  • #113
  • 06 Oct 2015
  • 10:34

One motor -> two movements. That's quite powerfull when it comes to building robots and completing challenges at different competitions. The principle is always the same. Check out the video to get the idea on how to use it.

Natures Fury Buildings

Building instructions for the LEGO Mindstorms robot attachment used at the FIRST LEGO League Natures Fury Competition. This robot attachment takes two of the building and moves them without demolishing them. It is a good example of the use of gear wheels and worm gear. The gear wheels move levers in opposite directions. 

English

In this video we are solving the 2013 Nature's Fury construction challenge. It was quite interesting challenge and we are again using our EV3 competition robot. We'll build an attachment that uses a construction of system of gear wheels and it will be quite interesting attachment.

Now the mission was the following. You had these 2 blocks of the building, this is a whole building, and you had these 2 blocks in the base. So these 2 blocks are in the base and these blocks are somewhere on the field and the goal of the mission was actually the following. You should move this building to another location on the field, like 30-40 cm from it's location, so you've got to move this to another location and then you get a point for each block that is standing and you can also put these 2 blocks on top.

I think it was 10 points, but it doesn't actually matter and at the end you get 1, 2, 3 ,4 , 5 - 50 points if it was 10 points. Now this is an interesting mission and first it involves that you must somehow move this whole construction to another place on the field and then you must put this on top. We've always wanted to solve this mission as a single mission, so we've built an attachment that solves basically this mission. I know that some of the attachments are specifically designed for one mission, but this is our goal to give you an idea for specific missions and in other videos we show ideas for 3, 4, 5 missions at a time.

The attachment that we built looks like this.

We have the attachment, this here is the attachment. A few things about the attachment. First, our EV3 competition robot is mainly designed if you want to make attachments that are below the robot or somewhere here at the lower part of the front of the robot. It is not very convenient to attach something right here at the top of the robot and that's on purpose because most of our attachments are pin-less attachments that you just put the robot on the attachment and everything works. For other situations, other missions you might want to extend this robot and you can use such an attachment like this one and you just add this attachment.

Now you can easily extend the robot and provide additional places where you can add attachments. I'll just add this, right here, at the top like this.

Now we can also use this upper side of the robot to add other attachments, attachments that are let's say taller. I'll add our attachment, let me just attach it to the robot

and now I'll add a cable and I'll start the attachment. Now I've connected the motor and when I rotate the motor in on of the directions the attachment open and in the other direction the attachment closes. Now this attachment has an interesting idea because with a single motor we get 2 movements and these 2 movements are very important for the work of the attachment, so it's not actually the attachment but the principle that it follows. When we are in the base we load the parts in here, two of the parts because are in the base. They stay like this. Now when I open the attachment it will first open the lower part and after only a number of degrees, I'm not sure how much exactly but only after a few moments it will start opening the upper part of the attachment like this. Now we are opening only the lower part of the attachment and at a certain moment we start opening the upper part and we release the building. Let's return back this attachment to initial position and I'll try to show you the idea.

The whole magic happens actually right here

on this axle and the lever for this axle. Now when I start opening the attachment you can see that there is some space for this whole attachment to move up and when the beam touches the axle then it will start opening the upper part of the attachment,

now.

We return to initial position.

As you can see the axle and the beam are currently not touching and this axle here and the beam, right here, and when we start rotating we have the first movement and only after this point, from now on you have the second movement. That's the interesting part of this attachment. The rest is just some worm gears, gear wheels, levers, beams, etc. and just some form so that we can actually move the whole building, but these 2 movements could actually solve the whole mission for us. How do we solve the mission. We take this 2 parts, we load them in the attachment and it takes some time but that's not important because this happens before the round.

Now we've loaded the whole attachment, we move on the field, the parts are not falling and we move on the field then we reach the other part of the building and we must now take this building with us and move it to another region on the field. Then we reach, we open, just so that we can take the building with us, we align to the field, we know that we are exactly there, then we configure how wide we would like to open, then we take the building, we close the attachment

and then we move, we move on the field and while moving we can see that the building inside is not falling. Why? Because we have these parts here that are assisting it. We move until we reach the place that we have to leave the whole building and then we open the whole attachment.

Then we just move away from the building and we leave the building on the field and that's the mission. With a few configurations it would work also for other missions but again the most important part of this attachment is that we can actually make 2 movements with a single motor.

I would welcome any comments for this and for other attachments and below the video you can find instructions for this attachment. Check them out.

Courses and lessons with this Tutorial

This Tutorial is used in the following courses and lessons

Image for FIRST LEGO League (FLL) 2013 Nature's fury. Review of solutions with explanations
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Image for Code Construction mission
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