This week we fully put the robot together. We first created a new back trunk area to hold our batteries, placed all of our components on the lexan plate on the top of the bot, 3D printed a camera stand, finished soldering wires and taping down the cords for all of our components so that we fully cleaned up the bot for testing. After putting everything together, we started debugging issues that came up, including resolving our turn angle issue. We had been struggling with turning fewer degrees when centering the bottle since when just commanding the robot to turn, it would stop responding to commands when the turn angle became small. However, we resolved this by making the robot move forward a bit while turning just to initiate the movement, which has allowed us to whittle down the turn angle significantly and to not lose track of the bottle or never be able to center it when attempting to center the tracked bottle.
Throughout all of this we also started testing the robot in its 3 bottle in 1.5 meter radius course. Picking up one bottle seemed pretty consistent and so we put it all together. Through more than 10 trials of the 3 bottle 1.5 meter radius course, we have seen several instances of golden runs, but many trials involved the bot not seeing a bottle, specifically it being continually swept to the side by the bot’s structure, or failing to pick up a bottle as the intake mechanism doesn’t trigger fast enough or the angle calculation is off. All of these issues we will continue to fine tune into this coming week. One big issue is the time that it takes to complete the task is far too long. That is our top priority for this week but it may just come down to rescoping our use case requirements.
This coming week we will continue to work together to get the accuracy of the bot up and the time down.
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