UCLouvain Bumble Bot: Mission Mars

Hi! This is the BumbleBot team, one of the 6 groups of Mechatronics master1 students from UCLouvain who participated in the 2024 Eurobot competition. For this competition, we designed from scratch and assembled piece by piece a fully functional autonomous robot. The theme of this year was “Farming Mars!”. For this reason, all of the actions our robot is made for are centered around handling plants and pots or providing energy for its designated greenhouse.

Using mecanum wheels, two forks and compact electronics, our robot was the only one of the competition that had the ability to achieve the complex moves required to unstack the pots and fit the plants in their pots. It was also able to stock 6 of them at a time directly in their respective safe zones. While this strategy was inefficient points-wise for the competition, the result was a reliable and polyvalent robot that still managed to land a 4^th place in the Belgian qualifiers (out of 18 teams!) as well as the jury’s award for best design.

Among the various new skills we learned this year were soldering and board designing. Those skills really helped organizing our robot and troubleshooting development issues. We thank Eurocircuit for the quality products they delivered. Those boards were able to perform perfectly despite the abuse that unexperienced hands put them through.

If you want to learn more about our journey this year, you can watch this short video detailing the making of our wonderful robot. BumbleBot_2024_v2.mp4