A Kicking Mechanism For A Soccer Playing Robot: A Multidisciplinary Senior Design Project

This paper describes a multidisciplinary capstone senior design project that involves the design, build and test stages 1 . It is a two-semester project that was conducted by five senior students in the Department of Engineering at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW). The objective of this project is to design and build a kicking mechanism that can be seamless attached to a Pioneer 3-DX mobile robot. The Pioneer 3-DX robot and kicker combination should be able to locate a soccer ball, approach and control it and finally kick it in a desired determined direction a minimum of five meters, through preprogrammed kicking strategies. This paper also describes several different assessment approaches used throughout the project. The faculty members from the Department of Engineering and the local sponsors conduct the assessment. The assessment results are provided. The impact on the engineering curriculum of this on-going Robocup project is also discussed at the end.