This week, our team spent most of our time preparing and doing the interim demos. We believe our biggest risk is still with our launch, as now we have to wait for our replacement motor board to arrive, but after our lower power tests this week we are more confident that it will launch our required distance of 20+ feet. This week we also have been considering a design change by the suggestion of Tamal. Since we have fallen slightly behind due to our parts breaking down, he made the suggestion to instead use a mobile robot for the turning of the base instead of our current turret design that we would have to build from scratch. This idea could both make implementing the turning easier and more reliable, but also opens up many more possibilities, such as actually moving towards a target who is out of range. We think this idea is promising and we have been researching what robot kit would be the best to use, so we can have it ordered hopefully by Monday. We would still likely use the PVC materials to place on top of the robot to give the launcher some height, but the actual lid would now be stationary with the robot doing the turning and moving instead.
Over the new week, once our new board and potentially our robot arrives, we want to focus much more on working with the motor control code and actually integrating all our subsystems now that we have tested them individually.
Over the next few weeks we will be continuing to run tests as we finish and integrate our subsystems. So far we have been able to test a low power version of the launch as well as the computer vision and physics calculations separately, all of which gave promising results. In the coming weeks as we integrate all these systems as well as implement the turning, we will also be running many tests on these. We will ensure that the range and physics calculations actually match up with the physical launch and tune them as necessary, and that our targeting actually properly tracks the target and our launcher faces them respectively. Based on the results of our tests, we will likely have to tune our targeting algorithms however much necessary to ensure the accuracy meets our requirements.