This week I focused on finishing up the mechanical work and integration testing. For the mechanical side, I designed a top layer platform to house the battery, Jetson Nano, buck converter, camera, and additional circuitry. The updated BallBot CAD model is shown below:
After verifying the designs, I quickly constructed the top layer from acrylic, and attached all the electronic components using M3 Dual Lock adhesive. We chose this adhesive because it, like velcro, allows us to quickly remove and service parts, but it has better durability than velcro. Below is the arrangement of our electronics on top of BallBot as well as a front view of BallBot.
With all the sensors and compute attached to BallBot, we could switch our focus to integration testing. We loaded our most recent code onto the onboard Jetson Nano, set up a chain of balls in the lab, and let BallBot run. Here is a video of the result:
As demonstrated above, BallBot is able to autonomously drive towards and pick up tennis balls.
To end the week, we decided to give BallBot a makeover. We painted the bot black with our logo in green. Below is a picture of the new BallBot:
For next week, I plan on finishing the mechanical construction by building the basket attachment. Additionally, we plan on doing our final integration tests on the CMU tennis courts.