TOW3R - ROBOTREMIX3

TOW3R

By Thomas Madeya

My contribution to #robotremix3 is TOW3R, named after the puzzle game “Tower of Hanoi”. If you don’t know the game you should learn about it first from

Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi.

I use the tires from both sets to create 3 “discs” of different diameter. TOW3R moves them around according to the rules of the game. Here are first photos I took to discuss the idea even before the actual build started

My first sketches for TOW3R already showed the key construction concepts:

Turntable driven by one motor to rotate to three different positions
Second motor to move the arm up/down
Third motor to open/close the claw

However, the ideas I had for the sensors did not turn out to be effective. The final model uses the color sensor to detect the position of the turntable, while the touch sensor detects when the arm reaches the up-most position.

Here is a video to TOW3R performing the minimal number of moves to solve the “Tower of Hanoi” puzzle game.

It took me several iterations of building and programming to get to the final model. Especially grabbing tires of different size with have more sensors and LEGO pieces at hand was a big challenge.

If you would like to learn more about how I solved that and several other challenges, please download the full story. Moreover, you can also download the EV3 project file.

The TOW3R Story (PDF, x pages) http://lego.brandls.info/random/rr3/the-tow3r-story.pdf

TOW3R.EV3 (LEGO MINDSTORMS project file) http://lego.brandls.info/random/rr3/tow3r.ev3

Building instructions are not available yet, but are planned to be created soon.

You can contact me at thomas@nano-giants.net.

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