LUKE

Date: 2-7-14

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Date: 2-10-14

-Today, we spent most of the time focusing on trying to get the robot to touch the oven button.  It would touch occasionally but the turns of the robot were incredibly inconsistent so it would only touch the oven 1 out of every 7 times or so no matter how much we tweaked it.

Date: 2-13-14

-yesterday we mostly focused on getting the robot to touch the button on the oven and integrating the RPS system.   Previously, when we tried getting the robot to touch the oven button the turns that the robot made were incredibly inconsistent and it was nearly impossible to touch the button.  The RPS helped a lot in that respect, but the robot still isn’t exactly consistent when it comes to touching the button.  It should suffice for the test tomorrow.  The robot is still pivoting exclusively around its back wheels.

That can be a good thing for consistency but, theoretically, a 4wheel drive system should pivot around the center (lengthwise).  It is probably due to the fact that the back wheels have a lot more friction than the front wheels.  We should be careful not to add too much weight to the front of the robot in order to keep the robot’s turning patterns consistent.  The 4-wheel drive should be allowing the robot to drive in very straight lines, which it is doing very well, but I would like to see if the robot would still drive straight without the 4-wheel drive in place.  If it still does we might want to consider scrapping the drive chains as the could very well be more trouble than  they are worth at this point.

 

Date: 3-28-14

 

Today was the first individual competition.  overall, we did well but bad luck prevented us from doing better.  The first run we scored 20 points and completed the button, and pin tasks.  The line following, however, failed on the skid and we drove into a corner and got stuck.  On the second run we only got 5 points becuase of an RPS error that cause us to turn 180 degrees too far.  On the third run, we got 40 out of 50 points, getting everything except for the charge zone and button.  that was the highest score in our class, meaning that we got 15 extra credit points added to our grade score for a final grade of 55/50.  Overall, pretty good day.

We are still tweaking things, eliminating bugs, and increasing the margin of error wherever we can.  current plans involve adding a sponge to the button presser so that we are less likely to miss it by a fraction of an inch.  We are also considering having the robot constantly keep track of its own calculated heading, as opposed to using the RPS heading data, in order to eliminate a handful of bugs in our turns which are currently primarily RPS based.  We are looking strong heading into the competition, but we will continue to tweak the robot and its code in order to decrease the chances of any small hiccups, like those that happened at the individual competition today.

 

Date: 4-19-14

The Robot competition is just about over now.  The final competition has passed.  Our robot preformed very well, we got about 40 points in each of the round robin runs, and we managed to get third place in the elimination round.  The final oral report went very well.  We finished on time and the TA’s we talked to said we did very well.