MIT Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering | Design Minor
UC Berkeley Master’s in Mechanical Engineering | Design Concentration

Robot - Black Widow
Student - Spring 2018



One of six in the class who won the 2018 Whitelaw Prize for “originality in design” by the MIT Mechanical Engineering department.

Built a robot in the MIT Mechanical Engineering class, Design and Manufacturing I. The goal of this class is to construct a robot only using simple shop tools, provided electronics, and a lathe and mill. At the end of the course, the robot then competes on a game board.

My personal goal was to lift an object to the top of a tube with a robot of unique design. The completed product was in part, a holder robot and a deployable robot explained in an interview that was displayed at the final competition. The holder robot is the robot that contains the other and carries it across the gameboard to the tube. The holder robot has a cylindrical containment area of the same diameter as the tube, so when the deployable robot drives up, it can transfer seemlessly between the container and the tube. The completed robots in action can be viewed in this video.

Modeled in SolidWorks.


The photosensor attached to the bottom of the holder robot allows for an initial autonomous portion that brought the robots towards the tube. The arduino code then allowed for the switch to a remote control portion, where the holder robot could be correctly lined up with the tube. Then, using the same controller, the deployable robot could be driven up the tube.


To the right is a detailed CAD model of the two robots within the contrained starting dimensions for the competition. Below, are photos of the deployable robot using Autodesk Inventor.