Boston University ECE Senior Design Capstone Project

Awards:

• Outstanding Senior Design Project in Electrical & Computer Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University College of Engineering
• Finalist and Honorable Mention, 2016 Intel-Cornell Cup

Consolidated Edison electrical substations use high-voltage circuit breakers to manage and protect electrical grids. These circuit breakers are frequently inserted and extracted from their housings for testing, maintenance and replacement, but due to their large size and weight are difficult to maneuver and manipulate; this is further exacerbated by the low tolerances required for aligning the breakers with their housing. In addition, arc flashes can occur when inserting or extracting the breakers, posing a dangerous hazard to any human workers in the vicinity. 

The goal of BreakerBot is to remove the human operators from this task and replace them with autonomous robots capable of inserting, extracting, and maneuvering circuit breakers. Not only will BreakerBot reduce the potential for damage resulting from misalignment of the breaker and cabinet, but it will also reduce the chance of injury to a human worker should an arc flash occur. Due to the scope of the project, it was divided into several phases to be spread out over multiple senior design courses. Phase 1 (2015-2016) involved the construction of a prototype, scale-model BreakerBot capable of autonomous alignment with a circuit breaker and cabinet, wireless control via a laptop and local area network, and live video feedback.

Source code, schematics and other information for BreakerBot are available on Github.