This week, our team has continued making refinements and improvements to the project by adding new functionalities, modifying our system, and fixing bugs. At this point in our schedule, every individual component and subsystem of our project is complete and functional, and our current focus is on refining various aspects of the robot in order to finalize the robot and make the project come together.
The most significant risks to our project right now are various small issues that could result in the failure of one of the components of our project. For example, the way we zero out our gantry system involves moving the painting head into the corner as much as possible. However, this action presents a certain amount of strain and force on the corner of the gantry, which sometimes causes gantry components such as the belts to shift slightly out of position. To mitigate this, we are looking into either alternative ways to zero out the system or, more simply, finding a way to soften the impact between the painting head and the corner of the gantry. Another risk is the stability and strength of our 3D printed parts. We are solving this by printing backups as well as experimenting with slight modifications to our 3D printed parts which should result in a more stable and structurally sound gantry.
No significant changes have been made to our design outside of small modifications made in order to solve various small issues we encounter, such as slightly modifying the size of a 3D printed part or slightly shifting a component in our gantry system. The carriages were redesigned to hold the rods better and not have them pop out all the time. There are no major changes to our schedule, as our progress this week as a team is mostly on track. The testing and refinement of our project is going smoothly and as planned, and we are also spending time preparing for the demo on Wednesday.