Team Roboticus: Smarter Bots, Bigger Goals

Team Roboticus is a Dutch robotics team with 56 young members aged 12 to 19. Over the past decade, our team has designed and built autonomous robots, while qualifying and participating in competitions across the globe. This  academic year, our senior students are set on improving their soccer robots for the Robocup Junior World Championship 2 vs 2 Lightweight Soccer competition in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Our goal is to become one of the top performers in the competition!

To build a more reliable and high-performing soccer robot capable of withstanding collisions, we needed to redesign our original PCBs. At last year’s worldchampionship, we noticed some components on the PCB were prone to falling off due to the big impact collisions between our robots and the opponent’s robots. Our Electrical Engineers have redesigned the bottom and top PCBs to improve reliability, durability, and performance. Once finalized, Eurocircuits professionally manufactured them, helping bring our upgraded designs to life.

The revision was mainly focussed on the bottom PCB, such as supporting the phototransistors with brighter through-hole LEDs instead of SMD Leds, which improve line detection on the soccer field while reducing the number of components and easy soldering and maintenance. We also added self repairable fuses on our separate power traces in case of a short circuit which makes sure that the rest of the components on the PCB are protected, this enables us to repair our PCB’s much more easily as opposed to last year where some of our PCBs were made unusable due to most of the components not working properly or not at all. The current PCB also includes four motor controllers that enable smooth movement across all axes, along with a couple of optimized voltage regulators that enhance reliability. A powerful Teensy 4.1 microcontroller and an integrated Bluetooth module ensure seamless communication with the second robot and allow real-time software debugging. Although we hoped to implement a role-switching function between our attacking and defending robots, time constraints prevented us from adding it this season.

The upper PCB features IR receivers to track an IR Ball that acts as an IR beacon, an orientation sensor for accurate field positioning, status LEDs for troubleshooting, and a new camera module to detect the goals and opponents. This year we also built in a spot for a superteam module which made our robots able to be controlled by the referees and allow them to stop our robot for a particular time if our robot were to go outside of the playing field. By making sure our robots are highly modular, we future-proof our designs for upcoming competitions and increase their re-usability.

For more information please visit the Team Roboticus website.