We are on the final stretch for our project now and BallBot is really coming together. While this week was an extremely busy with each of our team members having several midterms, we still managed to make some progress on BallBot. This week we made subtle but important improvements to the software. Before, the Ballbot stopped moving whenever there were no balls in the field of view. Now, we improved the software so that the Ballbot first spins in a 360 degree circle when no balls are visible. If during this spin, it sees any tennis balls, the Ballbot stops spinning and goes after them. Otherwise, the Ballbot stops spinning until it sees more balls.
We also worked on the basket for the Ballbot and constructed it out of plastic. We used plastic so that the basket was lightweight and weatherproof. We also made the basket have a capacity of 30 balls so that it met our requirements. We are still designing a mechanism to attach the basket so that the basket is detachable.
Schedule Update
In the upcoming weeks, there are only a few things that remain for us to complete. We need to build a casing for the hardware components on the robot and do more testing to identify and improve upon the weaker aspects of the robot. We are fully on schedule and have pretty much finished the exterior of the robot. One thing that we really need to do is test the fully functioning BallBot on an actual tennis court. We wanted to do that this week however, we didn’t get a chance to do so due to the weather.