Due to many difficulties encountered during our testing (involving the wires, the Arduino nano board, the code and the reflectance sensors) as well as our team not understanding how to properly manage our time well in lab, our team was only able to test each track one time. We kept the code the same for each trial (making the AEV start, go up the first incline, and stop at the gate) as well as the design (we used the sample AEV design) in order to directly see the effects of the track. The code and design used for this test are as follows:
Code:
celerate(4,0,35,2);
motorSpeed(4,35);
goToRelativePosition(-215);
brake(4);
Design:
Data Analysis:
Track 1 Data:
Track 2 Data:
Track 3 Data:
Track 4 Data:
For each of the Power vs Distance graphs, the AEV is at full power right at the beginning/as soon as we hit the start button, which is represented by the approximately vertical line at almost zero distance. On each of the graphs for each track, the graphs are bumpy (the power does not remain constant) because the AEV cannot maintain a constant speed due to the variances in the tracks. It must constantly speed up and slow down to account for the impurities in the tracks. When looking at each of the Power vs Time graphs, the acceleration to maximum speed is about 1-2 seconds, meaning it takes the AEV 1-2 seconds to get to full speed after the start button is pressed. Once the motors shut off when the total distance has been traveled, all of the power in the AEV shuts off and any change in distance after that is just the AEV coasting.
The main difference between each of the Power vs Time graphs when comparing the different tracks is the ending time when the motors shut off. The motors on the first and third tracks turned off at around 7 seconds while the motors on the second and fourth tracks turned off at around 7.4 seconds.
It is evident that only partially completing this test limited how much information we obtained from the results and thus, didn’t give us the ability to completely see the differences that could be apparent in each track. Also, not being able to complete the motor quantity test hurt us in the end because we didn’t receive any information we could’ve obtained on the most energy efficient design and were therefore forced to decide on this aspect of the design with no data backing up our decision.