Davis Robotics Club

The Davis Robotics Club is a student run organization at the University of California, Davis. The club works to teach members the fundamentals of robotics, system engineering, and mechatronics through hands-on experience and participation in annual competitions. The club is made up of over 25 members that span multiple majors that include, but are not limited to, all of the engineering fields, mathematics, managerial economics, and physics.

We hold workshops every week to introduce  and expand our member's knowledge of programming, basic electronics, and working with microcontrollers. This is done in parallel with our mini-projects and the work to design and build our major projects. This spring quarter we will be working on two main projects, a mechanical arm that we are building from scratch and a strawberry carrying robot that is part of a research project from the Dr. Stavros Vougioukas Agricultural Robotics Lab. We are also hosting and helping Bobby Kian from the Geology Department build and test a fixed wing UAV. You can read more about our projects under the project section and see our work as we post photographs throughout the next couple of months in the club website.

If you have a robotics related project and need space to work on it or need help to design and build any part of it, we are happy to welcome you!

Membership is open to everyone. No experience is necessary to join any of our activities.

Current Projects

Mechanical Arm (team lead Alex Landry): The goal is to build a lightweight electro-mechanical manipulator with three active rotational axis. This project is great for anyone enthusiastic about robotics. We will be sizing motors, designing mechanical assemblies, interfacing with microcontrollers, and coding dynamic motion through programming languages. So whatever flavor of engineer you are, there are plenty of ways to get involved. We even have the opportunity to incorporate and play with some awesome Pixy cameras that can be integrated into the arm.

Strawberry (Stavros) Robot: We are taking a mechanical engineering senior design project that has been kindly lent to us by Dr. Vougioukas' Lab so that we can upgrade it and test it. It is a four wheeled robotic vehicle that uses a Beaglebone Black as the controller. Tasks for this robot can include integrating the sensors into the main code, path navigation, obstacle avoidance, automation, etc.

Pixy CMUcam Mini Project: The Davis Robotics Club will have access to a number of Pixy cameras to test them out in various environments. This mini project can be linked with the other current projects.

UCD UAS - Environmental Monitoring Project (LAWR + E&PS): A team of undergraduate students are building a fixed-wing aircraft to fly autonomously over the Russell Ranch Research Facility a few miles West of Davis. The intention is to survey acres of farmland for changes in soil-moisture content and plant growth behavior over the course of the Spring grow/harvest period. The team is currently working on running hardware-in-the-loop simulations with a suite of electronic devices and testing out various wiring designs. The UCD UAS team invites students to collaborate with us on preparing the equipment for flight testing and gain some hands-on experience in programming, soldering, troubleshooting and optimization.

Feel free to contact Bobby Arlen for more details at [email protected].
(Please include "UCD UAS Inquiry" in the subject line to avoid the spam filter)

Member Work: 2014-2015 School Year

Fall 2014

Fall 2014 Pimp Your Appliance Project - Mobile Computer TeamFall 2014 Pimp Your Appliance Project - Mobile ComputerFall 2014 Pimp Your Appliance Project - Marshmellow Thrower

"Pimp Your Appliance Project" Link: https://davisroboticsclub.wordpress.com/projects/pimp-your-appliance-project/

Mini project where members were challenged to work in a teams of 5 to 6 people to take an appliance and build it up with an Arduino and two optional motors. The teams were challenged to obtain any other components without paying any money (or as little money as possible).

Past Efforts

The 2012 Robogames: For which we have built two autonomous sumo robots (3kg weight class).

The club has been working to design an autonomous quadrotor (essentially a helicopter with four propellers) to communicate with a ground-based robot called iMobot being developed in the Integration Engineering Lab, by club adviser Prof. Harry Cheng. There are several possible competitions in 2012 for our UAV.

Past Work Photos

Past-President Eric Ranstrom talking at the first general meeting in 2011

Club member using the project room's blackboard

Possible design for the UAV, visualized in a CAD program

Club member William Keller working on the sumo electronics