Exercise 2

EXTERNAL SENSORS

The purpose of this exercise is to become familiar with the external sensor hardware components, become familiar with troubleshooting techniques,
and to program function calls for using external sensors with AEV control.

The reflectance sensors are important to the MCR because they are what senses the wheel spinning, allowing the arduino to know how far it has gone, how far it has to go, and other recordables like speed. Any code that was used to test the Reflectance sensors can be found here.

Reflectance Sensors Attached to Sample AEV

 

Although most of the given functions to control the AEV are helpful, many of them have a downside. The brake function cuts the power to a specific motor, but it does not stop the vehicle automatically. Because of this, extra caution will have to be taken in order to calculate when the power to the motors needs to be cut. Similarly, when accelerating for any period of time, afterwards the motors will stop, but the vehicle will keep moving. This will cause issues when using functions the absolute or relative position functions because the vehicle will continue to move even after reaching that distance.