Robocon is Asia’s largest robotics competition. The national round (which serves as the first leg) is held in Pune and is organized by DD and ABU. The theme of ABU Robocon 2018 is based on an interesting Vietnamese folk game called “Shuttlecock Throwing”, played by their locals during their festival “N ́EM C`ON” - The Festival Wishing Happiness and Prosperity. Two robots had to be built for this competition - a manual and an autonomous robot. The manual robot had to transfer the shuttlecocks to the Autonomous robot. In turn, the autonomous robot had to shoot these shuttlecocks through rings/hoops. There were two rings (or three targets) on the field. The autonomous robot had to throw at least one shuttlecock through the first ring from two different positions. After successfully completing this, the robot could throw a shuttlecock through the second ring and into a cup to win the game. The robots had to follow a stringent set of rules regarding the dimensions, weight and other aspects. The winner of the national round was awarded the chance to represent India in the International Robocon held in Vietnam. The 2018 Robocon team focused on the development of more refined and robust systems than previous years for the different components and mechanisms used in the robots. Looking at the problems faced by past teams from IITD, the team managed to implement several new design strategies and features for this year. The following document contains the chronological design process that Robocon 2018 team followed to arrive at a complete system design. The document covers the integration of the subsystems into a complete robot and the fabrication of the robots. In the latter sections, testing and final results of performance of the two robots are presented. This document fully chronicles the steps that were followed by the team from the initial group formation to the final testing of the 2018 robots.
