Aditti’s Status Report for 3/18

This week I worked on motor tests for the robot. I worked on getting the robot to travel a fixed distance straight ahead, as well as rotate to a specific angle. I was able to get the robot to travel to within 2cm of the required coordinate and within 3 degrees of the required angle repeatedly. I then tested out the robot motion for a series of target coordinates to see how the error accumulates. During this process, I realized that the speeds for translation and rotation need to be tuned independently to ensure that there is no overshoot in either of them. A higher rotation speed and a lower translation speed were required. I also noticed that mid-range PWM signals were not enough to be able to generate enough power for the robot to move, which makes it difficult to implement PID control as the actual robot speed does not scale proportionally with the PWM signal. After tuning error margins, I was able to get the robot to automatically compute rotation angles from a series of coordinate inputs and follow them, however, the accumulated error is too high by the end of the 4th coordinate that the robot cannot converge to the target position. Having a tethered connection while testing to monitor the coordinates also skews the robot’s performance due to the additional forces on the robot. The robot is also completely unable to move on rough and textured surfaces such as carpet floors. I will continue to work on this for the next week and make the coordinate generation code randomized.