I built the robots below for the Aerial Robotics Competition while attending Georgia Tech. At the time, I had no idea that there was a robotics team at Tech but by luck saw the competition on T.V. That quarter I contacted the team and soon began building my first robot. This was really the beginning of my more sophisticated mechanical designs. I had always enjoyed building things as a kid and was able to use my mechanical aptitude to design and build all of the mechanics and electronics by hand. I ended up building 3 generation of robots for the team and feel that this was my most valuable experience from college. These types of projects provided me with the motivation to learn about things like electronics, mechanics and programming. 

The competition involved using some type of autonomous aerial vehicle to transfer orange puck size disks from a pick-up bin to a drop-off bin. Our strategy was to use a gasoline powered miniature helicopter with on-board and off-board electronics for stability control and guidance. The helicopter would position a docked robot called a "retriever" over the pick-up and drop-off bins. This retriever was a separate autonomous robot and would lower itself from the helicopter into the pick-up bin, search for and retrieve a disk, pull itself back up to dock underneath the helicopter, and then drop the disk once over the drop-off bin. Someone used a good analogy by describing the retriever as a spider that could raise and lower itself from a thread. 

Link to Georgia Tech article about the competition

1995 Disk Retriever (Top View)
- Motorola HC11 Microcontroller with Assembly code
- Rear wheel electric drive with H-bridge controller
- Front wheel proportional steering using a mini servo
- One-bit radio receiver for dropping disk