This week, we spent a lot of time working together building the roof for the robot, attaching the hardware components, and painting the robot. Previously, we had the software running so that the Ballbot moved towards tennis balls and also had the tennis ball launching system be able to launch tennis balls towards the back of the robot. To combine these systems, we first created an acyrlic roof to go over the ramp in our launching system. We then attached all the hardware components including the Intel Realsence Camera, the Nvidia Jetson Nano, buck converter, motor controller, and battery to the top of the roof using M3 dual lock adhesive which works similar to Velcro. We also used a protoboard to solder the batteries output to both the motor controller and the buck converter which was attached to the Jetson Nano.
Once everything was attached, we first tested the motors to make sure they were working and then turned on the software to see how it would work with the tennis ball launching system. Fortunately, things went as planned and the Ballbot successfully chases down tennis balls within its field of view and launches them to the back of the robot.
After we tested the integration, we removed the arms and painted them to make the wood weatherproof which is needed for an outdoors device like the Ballbot. We still need to make protection for the hardware on top of the robot.
Next week, we plan on improving the software so that the Ballbot does not just stop when it doesn’t see more balls, but first turns in a circle so that it does not miss balls outside its field of view. Also, we hope to test the Ballbot outside on a tennis court which will require fine-tuning our computer vision.
Schedule Update:
We are currently on track with our schedule in terms of hardware and software. The one task which is slightly behind schedule is building the basket to collect the balls because we thought the rest of the project was more of a priority. We hope to build the basket this next week so that we are completely on the planned schedule.