This week, our team made significant progress into completing the overall system and having a functional robot.
Currently, the most significant risks to our project is the occasional jamming of the motors, which causes the gantry to fail every once in a while. This is being mitigated through several mechanical solutions, including putting lubricant on our poles as well as adjusting various aspects of the physical gantry. Another possibility is to have some sort of feedback system that would allow us to know when our motors have failed and the painting head is out of place. This would require either encoders on our motors or a camera which tracks the head. Both these solutions would require significant time and dedication to in the last two weeks of the project, so we will likely not go ahead with either of these as it is too big of an undertaking this late in the project cycle. Instead we will improve what we can in our current design to improve the consistency.
We made a few significant changes to our design. The first major change was that we redesigned the carriages. Since we wanted to reduce the jamming problem, make the belts fit better, and make the carriages fit better on the shafts, we made the carriages loop around the shaft instead of just clip on to them. We also changed their dimensions and made them more robust. To fix the deviation problem caused by the jamming of motors, we decided to put plastic tubing on part of each shaft, so that we could calibrate the head against where the tubing prevented the head from moving any further. There are no major changes to our schedule, as we continue to be in the testing and refinement stages of our project.