Team Nine/Journal

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Contents

Week 1

Day 1

Set up stuff on the laptop: ubuntu and ROS.

Day 2

Set up more stuff, started driving kitbot around.

Day 3

Keyboard control for the kitbot. More CAD.

Day 4

Laser cut the roller assembly for testing. We had some scrap box extrusions for mounting the roller. Results were positive with a 3" diameter roller wheel 1" off the ground. We also got the IR sensors working and calibrated.

Day 5

A little machining work including adding a pin to the white geared motor to complete the front roller assembly and bending some sheet metal to test collecting the balls. Got ball following working for the checkoff.

Weekend 1

Laser cut our base plate and the motor mounts. Ryan finished machining the adapter for the motor to a hex rod for our motor mounts. Machined the version of the supports and made the L brackets. Assembled everything with almost no problems and everything worked beautifully. Bent some sheet metal to mount the IR sensors to which mounts in between the side columns. SSHBot took her first steps!

T9 roboskeleton.JPG T9 testsshbotv1.JPG

Week 2

Tuesday

Robot Olympics: Had a chassis working so we didn't compete with kitbot with I think was a big accomplishment. Norman and Victor were about to hack together all the tasks quickly and we ended up getting all of them done first and won the robot olympics. There wasn't anyone else really competing, which was kind of sad but we were happy with our progress.

Thursday:

Laser cut the electronics layer and the mounts for it. Also trimmed the columns so that the entire robot was until 14" and could fit under the reactor. Ryan and Jacob realized that while all the flexibility we were adding with the notched and drawer layers was useful it also added greatly to out assembly and machining time.

Friday:

Mock competition 1: Had the front roller and 4 IRs working for wall following and detecting balls. Were able to get wall following and ball tracking done and when put together in a basic state machine we had many good runs were the robot would wall follow until it saw a ball and switched to ball tracking. The screw wasn't working so the balls just stayed on a piece of cardboard we used to collect the balls but we were able to score many points. The biggest problem we were having was going after a ball behind a corner and it would run into the wall on the way and still try to go straight towards the balls. We also found that with our camera mounted at 6" above the ground at the front plane of our robot if would loose sight of the balls at about 2" away.

Weekend 2:

Mystery Hunt and a ski trip.

Week 3

Friday: Mock 2:

Everyone pulled an all-nighter to get the robot ready for the second mock. Ryan and Jacob finished the CAD for the green layer and made it. Jacob tried to fixed the rat nest of wiring on the electronics layer and created a slightly neater nest.

We ended up not even competing in the mock competition because of a bug messing up the motors. That night, we found the problem was the motors were pulled in backwards. Labels were added so hopefully this doesn't happen again.

Weekend 3:

The roller -> sheet metal feeder -> screw -> green layer process was still not working so Ryan and Jacob worked to finally fix this. We found that mounts we had designed for the green layer weren't big enough and that the entire layer was not tall enough to score in the top of the reactor. This was caused because staff had originally told us that the balls would be 1.5" but they ended up being 1.75". This made our design for a top hat on our robot being at 14" would not allow balls to come height enough. Fixing this involved redesigning the entire top hat and extending the back two columns. By the end of the night we had the whole mechanism working expend for redoing the screw.

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