Design Notes

We will update this space with all of our design notes for the robot.

Our first task in determining what our robot design should be was to look at each mission and determine what sort of attachments could be used to accomplish each mission.  After reviewing the missions they had a plan for creating the robot.

Sorter Mission
We decided to start with the sorting mission.  After some discussion, we decided that using a wheel on a motor would be the best way to get the sorter to work.  It took a little work to determine the right way to mount the motor so that it would be very stable.  We created a basic bumper on the front that we could attach things to.

In the past, we have had issues with reproducibility in our missions because we relied on number of rotations rather than sensors.  So, as the robot was heading out to the sorter, we decided to add a color sensor to find the black line near the sorter.  Since we had the bumper on the front, attaching the color sensor was easy.  We learned in the past that we need to attach things with at least two points to keep it stable and keep it from spinning.

We had an issue with the light sensor tripping before it should because the robot was tipping forward and blocking out the light.  We added a bar to the front to keep it from tipping forward too far.

In the past we have had different starting positions for each mission, but this year, in order to keep things simpler, we have decided to try to always start the robot from the same position.

When we finally got the robot out to the sorter, we found that the robot was being driven forward from the friction between the two wheels, making the robot loose connection with the sorter wheel.  We fixed this with a simple modification to the program... we simply made the robot move backwards a little while the wheels were doing their work.

Salvage
Next we decided to try to accomplish the salvage mission.  We added a claw to the front that will allow us to grab the salvage pieces.  We are using the light sensor to determine when we pass the black line and then turning around to grab the salvage piece.

As we ran some of the missions, we found that the robot was a little unstable, so we modified the robot structure to make it sturdier.

We thought we might be able to do the salvage mission and the composting mission in the same run.  After we got the salvage mission seeming to work, we thought we could just back up into the composter to start it off, and then drive back to base.

We moved the bumper lower on the robot because the bumper was too high to trigger the composter.

After we had run the salvage and composting mission together many times, we found that it wasn't very predictable.  So, we decided to focus on getting the salvage mission working consistently first, and then trying to add the composting mission after we could successfully do that mission.

We are hoping that on the drive back from composting, we might also be able to trigger the demolition.