Redesign ball handling suspension for low-cost soccer robot

This report is the result of my bachelor end project and is performed to finalize the bachelor program for my study Mechanical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. This project is carried out in the section Control Systems Technology. The time reserved for this project was 252 hours, which equals 9 ECTS. It is a dual project which I have done together with Huub van Wesel and which we worked on from September until December 2012. We ended up investing more time on this project than the initially planned 252 hours, because the project was very interesting. The bachelor end project is done for team Tech United of Eindhoven University of Technology. The Tech United team is a group of students and employees who design, build and program soccer robots to compete in the RoboCup Middle Size League. This is a worldwide open source competition in which two teams of autonomous robots play soccer, with the ultimate goal of beating the human world champion team in the year 2050. I gained a lot of knowledge through this project about a large range of topics because of its multidisciplinary character. I learned a lot about redesign processes for reducing costs, its relation to realizing a design which can be produced in a cheaper way and I refreshed my knowledge about smart designing with as few parts as possible. This research and the accompanying report were performed together with Huub van Wesel who is also a TU/e student and with Peter Teurlings who is Fontys student and did his graduation on the robots. The coaching has been done by Heico Sandee from Tu/e, Jordan Bos from Tu/e and Franks Steeghs from ACE. I want to thank them for their good coaching, also I want to thank team Tech United for all their input in this project. I liked working on this project because it is nice to make an impressive design which is cheaper than the existing one and works equally well with the same specifications.