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Breakerbot (Senior Design 2016)

Co-Created with Emily Stern, Pete Benjathatchaporn, Dan Gorelick, Alex Wong,

Carolyn Niccolo, David Miller, Paul Gennaro, B.U, EC463/464, September 2015 - May 2016

Abstract: 

At Consolidated Edison (ConEd) electric grid substations, high-voltage circuit breakers are frequently inserted and extracted from breaker cabinets for testing and maintenance. The current process is extremely manually-intensive owing to the large size of the circuit breakers as well as the low tolerances between the breaker and cabinet. The deliverable was to construct a semi-autonomous robot prototype to automate and optimize this process and reduce the danger to employees. 

Key Contributions: 

As the Electrical Engineer of the team, my deliverable was the hardware architecture of the autonomous robot platform. This included component selection, subsystem integration, fusing, sensor firmware and power distribution. In addition to this, I had a small contribution to the architecture and design for our vision and control software.   

Results: 

Checkout the footage of Breakerbot in action! The Breakerbot team went on to win the best Senior Design Award for 2016 and was a finalist in the Intel Cornell Cup.

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