Behind the Bot: The Story of our R2 Unit

He’s the king of beeps and boops. He’s that famous blue droid. He’s made out of a large old Pepsi container and some odd bits lying around the lab. He’s R2-D2 – or at least our version of him.

Capitol’s R2-D2 homage is easily one of the most recognizable bots out of the collection currently being built by Capitol’s growing student robotics team. For this national engineers week we wanted to know more about how he came to be and meet a couple of the young engineers behind the bot.

Students Jacob Weaver and Annie Yang are two out of the three founding members of Capitol’s current robotics team. They continue to serve on the robotics team leadership board, passing on their skills to new members and helping to get them excited about engineering. Annie, a junior, is majoring in Electrical Engineering while Jacob, a senior, is a Cybersecurity major. It hasn’t always been an easy journey reviving the interest in robotics, but they never gave up on the club or their robots.

How did you guys come up with the concept for R2?

JW: I believe the last year we had a robotics team was 2012, but back in my freshman year myself and some other people grouped up to revive robotics in 2016. At the time Professor Mehri was in charge of all the old robotics parts and it used to be in his lab. So Professor Mehri was our club mentor for our first year and he suggested that we make R2D2 because he’s an iconic robot. With his assistance we revived the club and found that we just had a whole bunch of old parts lying around. So we decided to create robots with the things that we had.

Was the Pepsi machine that makes up R2’s body one of the things you had laying around?

JW & AY: Yeah.

JW: I don’t know why it was in his lab, but it was just in there.

How functional was it when you were first working with it? Was it an actual soda dispenser?

JW: No, it was just a plastic outer casing. It had nothing inside.

Wow, so you did build it from the ground up?

AY: Yeah, pretty much.

JW: R2D2 was one of our first projects back when we first started. As far as building goes, some of the pieces were already put together. The drive chain with the motors and the gear box for example.

AY: The treads.

JW: Yeah, the treads were donated by NASA. We had that laying around as well.

So he’s a proper space robot. With treads by NASA and everything!

They laugh.

Except when he runs out of WiFi. I remember having to help push him one time.

JW: Yes! We fixed that issue. Now he runs on a hotspot instead of the school’s WiFi. He’s more like an RC car and he can travel a little bit further now.

What would you say was one of the most challenging parts of building him?

AY: For the while it was the power.

JW: Yes. So for our first power system we had car batteries. Those car batteries had just been sitting around for, I don’t even know how long. They’re completely sealed lead acid batteries, so it just requires maintenance to get it to work again, but they last not long at all. We also previously had a full computer running in there.

AY: He means a literal full computer. It’s a small computer, but the whole thing was dropped in there.

JW: And that used tons of power just to be on. So that was one of the problems with the power systems. Another problem was the batteries that we were using didn’t last very long to begin with because of their age and you couldn’t charge them up to proper voltages. Those were some major things that were wrong with him at first that we’ve now changed. Now he never runs out of battery.

What did you guys do to solve that?

J W: Well the two things that we changed were…

AY: …the batteries and the computer.

We all laugh.

JW: Yeah. So the batteries, instead of having three full-on car batteries we just use one motorcycle battery.

AY: A new motorcycle battery. It’s brand new.

JW: It is new and with that it runs almost forever. For the computer we replaced it with a raspberry pi. Instead of using 250 watts for a full-on computer it now uses like 5 watts, so a lot less power consumption there.

Was it already primed to be an R2 unit or did you guys decide that you liked the idea of that and wanted to roll with it?

JW: It was more like Professor Mehri suggested that we make an R2D2 and we had the stuff for it lying around. It was really simple, all we had to do was slap all the right pieces on top of each other and get it to work.

Some people would find that intimidating though, because you’re just looking around at a whole bunch of parts that could be anything and bringing it all together.

JW: Some people like me find that actually easier. When you don’t have anything lying in front of you but you have the option to make things that aren’t in front of you I think it’s a little more daunting. With something like that you have the entire world of parts. You have custom parts or parts ordered off the internet, whereas if you have something that’s in front of you it’s like Legos. You just put it together. The hardest part of getting him to work was probably the programming. For the electrical parts it was mostly wiring things together. I don’t think any circuit boards were made.

AY: No, none were made at all.

Was the programming pretty complicated?

JW: It’s not super complicated but it does involve newer age robotic related stuff because he is WiFi connected. He’s not running on a PLC or anything like that. He’s fully connected to the internet and his controller is running a real-time operating system like the ones someone in the industry would be using.

Tell me about the robotics club. Has it grown a lot since you started it back up?

AY: Yeah.

JW: Definitely. Our first year we were doing okay. We had a consistent group of about five people. The second year, last year, we had a change in management. We were kind of kicked out of the networking lab and had to move over here to what is now the robotics lab. A lot of logistics changed. This semester we have about thirteen that consistently come every single week, but we probably have between twenty and twenty-five people that participate in total.

Who are you looking for in a member?

JW: Anybody from an electrical or programming background.

AY: Cyber students. We need more cyber people.

JW: Yeah, I’m one of the only programmers in the club. I’m currently training two more members on programming, but we could always use more.

And the programming is an integral part of robotics?

JW: It is an integral part of robotics. Robotics is the combination of electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and programming.

Ah, so it’s like mechatronics?

JW: Pretty much.

AY: Exactly.

What do you think would draw someone to robotics or mechatronics?

JW: I think everybody would be interested in robotics because depending on wherever they are programming-wise. If you program something you can see its effects in real life, which is really cool as a programmer. With electrical engineering same thing.

AY: Same thing pretty much.

J W: Making a power supply is nice, but designing a robot circuit can be more rewarding.

AY: If you make a power supply you just see a number that pops up on your multi-meter, 24 volts. It’s still an accomplishment, but it’s different.

Yeah, you’re almost bringing something to life with robotics. It’s moving, it’s performing a task, it’s doing a job in some way.

JW: Kind of like a mad scientist. You get to be a bit like Frankenstein, although maybe that’s a bad analogy…

We laugh.

AY: The creator Frankenstein did regret his decision, but we’re not regretting ours.

JW: To be fair, R2D2 is kind of a Frankenstein.

In a lot of ways it is, based on what you were saying. You found a way to take things that you had and turn them into something cool and recognizable that does something. And it sounds like you’ve made consistent improvements to it over the years.

JW: Yeah. We do improve it every year. We’re planning to add LED lighting to him soon. It’s not added quite yet, but that’ll be soon.

AY: We had a little electrical snafu.

What’s your advice for dealing with setbacks? It seems like a lot of the time when you’re building something you’re going to run into roadblocks with stuff that’s just not quite what you expect.

JW: Yeah, we’ve run into those issues sometimes.

AY: A lot of times.

JW: When you’re using parts that are just lying around you have to just kind of not give up. You won’t be able to make it better or even finish if you just give up. Odds are there’s probably a simple solution and you just have to think it through and keep working on it. Sometimes it’s possible to get what you’re working on to work again, but you just need a different perspective.

AY: Take a break. Breathe in. Breathe out. Eat a cookie, and look at it again.

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The Capitol robotics club is accepting new members now. If you are interested please email them at Captechroboclub@gmail.com.

Capitol is also offering new engineering degrees next year in mechatronics and mechatronics and robotics. Check out all of our engineering degrees here!