Team Nine/Final Paper

Revision as of 02:47, 8 February 2012

Team 9 Journal

Sensors 4 IR 16 1 Drive Motor 7 1 Stock Motor 5

TOTAL 28

Day 1: January 9

Yeaaaaa!!!! The first day of Maslab!!! One of our team members had to drop out because of an overload of work :( but we toughed that out, and had an early meeting at 10am (This is early for me...(Oh yea this is Isaac!)). We discussed kind of the general design of the robot, and what our strategy would be to capture balls. We decided to try to shoot balls over the wall and past the purple line for maximum points. We pretty much thought it would take too much time and effort to shoot accurately into the green box. Our robot design looked a little like R2-D2!! XD In general, we would run over the balls, and suck them up into our hopper (ball holder) inside our robot using rollers. Then the balls would be shot out from the rotating head at a high speed using rollers.

Then we went to lecture, and learned some stuff about the what Maslab is, the rules, and a bunch of other Maslab things. Later, we went into lab, obtained our box, opened it, and stared in awe. For the longest time, we were trying to figure out how to use all the things that were in the box. Hans went off and went solder crazy. Staphany and I stared at the parts trying to use our ESP to make the parts build themselves into our robot. When we found out that didnt work, we stuck things together using logical methodology.

A MASLAB Tale or: the Souls of Three Engineers in Exchange for One Robot

TEAM 9: Officially “It’s Implied” (known in the streets as: “Blood Sweat n Tears”)

ROBOT: Officially “Rolo” (affectionately called “Hiccup”)

I. Overall Strategy

    Of the four types of points that could be scored – short distance, long distance, green box, and possession – the type of goal we chose to work toward was the long distance shot. Our choice was not only due to the highest point-yield of long distance balls, but also because we believed that it would not require too much of a stretch in our mechanical design. Other important aspects of the physical robot we considered were speed and ball capacity.
    As for the software design, we opted for a state machine approach and incorporated threads to coordinate the many tasks given to the robot. We took advantage of the python bindings available in OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) libraries for image processing functions.