Team Two/Final Paper

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==Mechanical Design==
==Mechanical Design==
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Our robot was designed for robustness and reliability. Our robot serves as a reliable platform for the software vision and control systems. As such it should be sturdy, constructed quickly, have extremely low mechanical failure rates, be able to withstand hours of testing, and be robust to positioning errors.
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Our robot was designed for robustness and reliability. The robot serves as a reliable platform for the vision and control software systems. As such, it should be sturdy, constructed quickly, have extremely low mechanical failure rates, be able to withstand hours of testing, and be robust to positioning errors.
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The robot's structural members will be built primarily from acrylic sheet. It will utilize a rubber band roller powered by a DC motor to collect balls and 4-bar linkage hopper actuated by a servo to get balls over the wall. DC geared motors will drive no-slip wheels.
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The robot's structural members were built primarily from 1/4" acrylic sheet. It utilizes a rubber band roller powered by a DC motor to collect balls and 4-bar linkage hopper actuated by another DC motor to get balls over the wall. DC geared motors will drive no-slip wheels.
===Drive System===
===Drive System===

Revision as of 02:32, 26 January 2011

Contents

Team Members

  • Leighton Barnes - Course 18, 2013 - Focused on sensor design and electrical work. Instrumental in debugging robot in all disciplines.
  • Cathy Wu - Course 6, 2012 - Focused on major software components: vision, testing suite, multi-threading, ball collection and scoring behavior. Managed day-to-day activities and big-picture plans for the team.
  • Stanislav Nikolov - Course 6, 2011 - Focused on major software components: overall architecture, wall following, stuck detection.
  • Dan Fourie - Course 2, 2012 - Focused on mechanical design. Got things done extremely quickly.

Overview

Mechanical Design

Our robot was designed for robustness and reliability. The robot serves as a reliable platform for the vision and control software systems. As such, it should be sturdy, constructed quickly, have extremely low mechanical failure rates, be able to withstand hours of testing, and be robust to positioning errors. The robot's structural members were built primarily from 1/4" acrylic sheet. It utilizes a rubber band roller powered by a DC motor to collect balls and 4-bar linkage hopper actuated by another DC motor to get balls over the wall. DC geared motors will drive no-slip wheels.

Drive System

The high level design of the robot's drive system consists of three structural boxes secured together in a line. The two outside boxes contain the drive motors, which are mounted to aluminum plates for strength. The central box forms the majority of the rest of the robot's structure and primarily contains the hopper. The three boxes are fastened together with steel brackets (to leverage the powers of the laser cutter and to avoid excessive tapping) and locknuts (to ensure the final assembly did not disassemble).

no slip wheels

steel hubs

Electronics Mounting

Shock mounted laptop, monitor remove

ORC board plate

camera potting, adjustable

bump sensor suite

limit switches

battery slot

encoders

Scoring Mechanism

4 bar linkage

rubber band roller

stage 1
stage 2
stage 3

Electrical Design and Sensors

Motor Controllers

Because our robot design required four motors (2 drive motors, 1 to pick up balls, and one to score them) and our Orc Board only features three H-bridges, we had to design an additional circuit to control the last motor. The motor that drives the roller in the front to pick up balls only had to go in one direction, so we chose that one as the one that would be driven by this addtional controller.

Our first attempt at this additional controller was just a 40N10 power FET whose gate was driven by the digital out of the Orc Board (with a protection diode accross the motor of course). As we learned with this first attempt, the digital out of the Orc Board is somewhere around 3.7V, instead of the nominal 5V, which could barely overcome the 2-4V gate threshold voltage of the FET (or any other power FET we had on hand). Instead of spending the time to build a gate driver to get around this problem we tried an L298 H-bridge package instead. This worked with the logic-level voltage provided by the Orc Board although we stuck to one directional capability in favor of using the standard four protection diodes instead of one.

Batteries

NiCd and Lithium options reasons we used lead-acid

Sensor Choice

bump sensors

break-beam

encoders

IR range-finders

gyro (or lack thereof)

Software Design

Architecture

cathy

vision driven

color calibration

state machine with bump detection and timeouts

sensor abstractions

Multi-threading

cathy issues?

States

cathy

what states

timeouts

Vision

cathy

color calibration

data structures

botclient

documentary mode

Wall following

stan

Stuck detection

stan

Testing

Testing suite

cathy

Mechanical Issues

ball jamming

eeepc access

battery placement

bump sensor coverage

pins falling out

motor failing

Failure modes and Countermeasures

Electric Issues

leighton

single-conductor wire and broken connections

uORC sample rate

power for fourth motor

Software Issues

cathy & stan

multi-threading

ball jamming

wall following

stuck detection

Performance

Suggestions

  • Form a team early and commit to doing MASLAB for all of IAP. We formed our team before the start of the school year.
  • Have a well balanced team. It's important to cover all grounds with software, mechanical, and electrical. Our 2 software + 1 mechanical + 1 electrical combination balanced us very well.
  • Work really really hard and stay motivated. We pulled endless all-nighters and never gave up. We continued to pester the staff mailing list with questions and even took a day to set up some legit practice fields in 26-100 before the seeding tournament.
  • Start before IAP and aim to have most of everything done in the first 2 weeks of IAP. Because we did most of the design before IAP, We managed to have a functional robot (not the pegbot) by the first mock competition, which helped us out greatly. We also were able to spend the last week and a half making fixes for various edge cases and had time to just polish up things.
  • Test often and relentlessly. You'll find something wrong with your robot every time.

Photos

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Screenshot of CAD model finalized before IAP
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