RoboMaster: Team UltraViolet

NYU's RoboMaster Team

Mechanical Engineer

September 2024 - Present

Team UltraViolet is NYU's robotics team, which participates in the RoboMaster North America competition. The team designs, develops, and assembles several robots that would compete in an eSports-like setting. As part of the mechanical engineering team, I am responsible for helping design key components, manufacture parts, and assemble the physical robot. I designed parts using SolidWorks and performed analysis on them to ensure that it would support the weight of the robot.

Suspension System

With changes happening to the terrain for the 2025 season, the team had to develop suspension systems for all of the robots. With my experience as a suspension engineer for NYU Motorsports, I designed a suspension system on SolidWorks and created manufacturing plans for the required components. The challenge was creating a suspension system that would be compatible with all of the robots, which would come in various sizes and weights. The system would also need to use up minimal space on the robot, as the majority of the space on the robot is already taken up by electronics and other key components.

Suspension geometry calculator (not the geometry used)

Firstly, I've come up with a suspension geometry that would have the ideal level of stability for the car. The upright was designed so that the wheels would have no camber. Although most suspension systems in cars use a push-rod and rocker, I've designed the suspensions excluding them to save space and allow for simplicity. The suspension geometry was verified on software that automatically calculated the roll center moment. The roll center moment determines how much the vehicle would roll when the driving surface changes. My goal was to minimize the roll center moment to best fit the terrain in the competition environment, which would be relatively smooth.

I then recreated this geometry on SolidWorks. A topology optimization simulation was run on the upright to determine an optimal structure that would increase its strength without a heavy impact on weight. The upright would be manufactured with CNC. However, the part proved to be too complex to manufacture with a standard 3-axis CNC machine we had available. Instead, a mount was created for the motor, and separate arm mounts were screwed onto it to assemble the upright. Meanwhile, the arms would be simply waterjetted from an aluminum plate.

Suspension goemtry recreated on SolidWorks

Finally, I've performed shock calculations to determine the adequate pound per inch for shocks. This involved taking the weight of a corner (since the robots are symmetrical on 4 sides, I simply divided the total weight by 4). Afterward, a compression length was determined using CAD. The weight of a corner, divided by the compression length, taking into account the point of contact of the shocks on the lower arm, was used to calculate the pounds per inch.

As of now, we are currently manufacturing the upright and lever arm according to my CAD design. We are also in search of shocks with the pounds per inch calculated. I was able to successfully design an effective suspension system that would be suitable for the competition terrain. This allowed us to compete and potentially win in the RoboMaster competition.