Today was spent connecting the robots to their brains. In the process new problems appeared and new solutions had to be applied. It turns out that making a robot move the way you want is difficult. A lot of time was spent trying to make gear teeth mesh correctly so that the motors will move the robot and its linear arm. Or to see if the servos will have enough torque to lift an arm or pick up a ring. While there were a lot of successes more problems and redesigns also occurred.
Excerpts from our engineering journals:
Control Hub
Work:
Reflection:
Picking up from our work yesterday, we used corrugated plastic to hold the control hub in a central part of our robot. To do this, we had to remove our robot’s back motors to put the corded plastic on.
Although we control the hub fully set up, we are blocking a part of our setup that contains the servo ports. We will probably need to move this tomorrow for better accessibility.
We continued our work on the rack and pinnion that we started yesterday. We began to start the initial contraption that will allow our robots to put rings on the tic-tac-toe board. We use a motor and gears instead of a servo to move the pinnion up and down.
We need to work on and expand this device so it can actually be used to put the rings onto the tic-tac-toe board. We also need to make sure that the gears stay aligned at all times because today we saw that the gears became misaligned at times.
We were able to code the robot to drive in all directions and move our rack and pinnion up and down.
We need to test if our code for our “claws” works because of previous cable management issues.
Elongated the second stage of the arm to make it easier to put the rings on the highest rod. completed the structure lifts the arm.
The new elongation changes the center of mass of the arm, if we add more counter weight, it might put too much pressure on the lifting motor, but there is no conclusion yet before we test with load. There are some conflicts between the arm and the front pushing structure. We have to remove some parts to make sure the arm is not out of limit.
Work: During our IL today, our group decided to add 1 more wheel to the base model, complete the arm to lift rings, and put on the servos to control the arms.
Reflection: The testing revealed a big weak point in our movement, specifically unable to turn the robot at all. We’re currently working on making the robot move its servos connecting to the arm, which Mr. Omilian is helping us with the process.
What made this day so productive was how in about 7 hours, we completely wired the arms and wheels, then we tested the robot’s movement after adding the brain.
Overall Improvement: need fixing on the movement of the robot, and start coding the servos.
Elongated the second stage of the arm to make it easier to put the rings on the highestRod. completed the structure lifts the arm.
The new elongation changes the center of mass of the arm, if we add more counter weight, it might put too much pressure on the lifting motor, but there is no conclusion yet before we test with load. There are some conflicts between the arm and the front pushing structure. We have to remove some parts to make sure the arm is not out of limit.
