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RPI ASME is dedicated to bringing different engineering projects to its members, and with a membership base extremely interested in robotics, the club is working to design and build an entry for the national ASME Student Design Competition. The challenge for this year is to create an all-terrain robot that can deliver cargo from one end of a course that includes water, sand, and stairs to the other end. The club has membership support for ASME Robotics not only from mechanical engineers, but also from electrical and computer systems engineers. With such a diverse membership, all participating members have the opportunity to work alongside engineers with various different concentrations. This allows our members the unique opportunity to gain experience and learn the various nuances of the forms of engineering they have minimal formal education in.
Because the group has so many members in different fields with different schedules, it is difficult to find common meeting times during the open lab hours of the RPI shops (such as the Processes lab and the IED lab). It would be beneficial for the robotics team to have access to an ASME lab that has some of the same tools so that the group can have more flexible hours, such as weekends and later at night. ASME has access to the Ricketts Student Project Lab (SPL); however, the SPL has a significant lack of tools. The club has been fundraising during the past several years to try to stock the lab with tools and parts; it has purchased a basic screwdriver set, a ratchet and socket set, and a wrench set. However, the lab lacks many basic tools that would be useful in construction of student projects. It does not have any working power tools at all and has very little in the way of parts like nuts and bolts and metal.
Our goal is to be able to have a lab with which we can construct several different robots. We realize that it would be impractical and illogical to completely duplicate the existing labs on campus; although it would be nice to have large machine tools like a lathe or a CNC machine, they are not what we need most. We would like to raise money to stock the lab with smaller tools that we would use more often and that would allow us to work on projects on weekends when labs are closed. Being able to stock power tools like hand drills, Dremels, or heat guns would be a great help to our different ASME groups and teams. Hand tools like allen keys, vice grips, hacksaws, and more would be useful when constructing robots as well. On the electrical side, we would like to purchase tools like soldering irons, multimeters, and needle-nose pliers as well.
With all the interest we have gotten for ASME Robotics, we would like to be able to enter multiple teams so that we can include more students in the competition. Having a lab of our own where we could work on the weekends would help out the group immensely, and would allow us to construct more, higher quality robots to represent Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Post time: Jul-03-2017