Alex Breton | Mechanical Engineer

  2.12 was an introductory course on robotics which taught the basics while building off of material I learned in my dynamics and controls classes. I learned about things like the usefulness of the Jacobian matrix and inverse kinematics.

  During the last six weeks of the class, teams designed and constructed robots to compete in a competition at the end of the class. Our competition was based around a soccer match, and each team was required to build either a goalie or a striker robot. My team, Messi Strikers, built a 3 DOF striker robot with a five-bar linkage and a swinging knee joint. In the competition, we beat out all other strikers, but eventually lost in the finals to the best goalie robot as it stopped all of our shots. Below is a highlight video of our robot accompanied by a riveting soundtrack.