For the final performance test, the team’s goal was to almost exclusively focus on traversing the course as energy and time efficiently as possible. This involved the AEV making it up an incline and stopping at a gate, pausing for seven seconds until the gate opens, traveling down another and softly attaching to a caboose at the end, and then finally making the trek back through the gate, to the starting position again. On the world scale, this project was meant to represent designs for new types of transportation in Columbus, Ohio, due to efforts and issues in the transportation field for citizens there.
After half of the progression during the third performance test, the team discovered a major part of the issues they had been facing up to this point. During testing, wires connecting the battery to the AEV became loose for unknown reasons, this resulted in less voltage than planned being supplied to the arduino board and therefore the propeller motors, decreasing the AEV’s speed and distance traveled. While this had been discovered within the time frame of the project, it was discovered too late for the members of team A to act upon it, leading to noticeable deficiencies when tested, and a reflected accuracy score of 34/40.
Due to the problems noted, team A became over the $600,000 budget by $78,941, with a time average of 59.5 seconds, and approximately 217 joules of energy used per run. Although the troubleshooting during the project likely resulted in becoming over budget, the team still learned plenty from those shortcomings. Despite occasional error from test trials possibly appearing to be random at times, the cause is likely consistent with the problem, and does not always have an obvious cause like the battery or sensor parts which govern the movement directly.