All excited for our first ever participation in pi-wars. William gates building was buzzing with enthusiasm early in the morning. Challenges We started with pi-noon's knock-off. We gave a good fight but got knocked out in the first round. Not an ideal start for the day. Next was lava palava challenge. We changed our wheels to standard wheels from mecanum as planned. We had to go in blind. No test runs were allowed. We were a bit sceptical on how the Robot run would go, if the sensors would work correctly, if the light was too bright, if the black was black enough. The bot however made a perfect run in 33 seconds. Yippee!! Eco-disaster time. We practiced well for this and were all prepared. We completed the task is about 2 minutes well within the allocated 5 minutes time. Minesweeper was a piece of cake with mecanum wheels. Next was escape route. There was a last minute hiccup with organizers announcing that the walls and obstacles were only 97mm high. We planned for or...
Today we put our craft hat on and sat together to build a chassis for our bot. We decided to build something with thin wood and a glue gun and something that doesn't block our sensors. We then brainstormed a bit on how to create an attachment on our chassis to collect the cans in eco disaster challenge. We had 2 ideas... Prototype for attachment idea-1 looked like this.. The second idea involved lollypop sticks :) Here is a short video showcasing our attachments. Finally it is time to paint our chassis and make it look cool. Well... it looks alright. Maybe we can better it.. that's for another day.
Today we tested the line tracking with a longer course that has a hump and sharper turns. We decided to switch to normal wheels for this task because the mecanum wheels struggled with sharper turns and the hump. We also found that if we made the middle colour sensor less sensitive it would work better because it only tracked a small width. We also made a course for the escape route challenge and tried to use the ultrasonic sensor. We ran into a few issues though like bad accuracy and odd distance readings. We stabilized it by taking a median of five readings at each instance. Finally for the eco-disaster challenge tests, we got some empty coke cans, filled them with stones to get a weight of 46g and we are all set. Our bot and chassis are stable (even comfortable with 3 cans at a time). Test run below:
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