This past week, I sent in our final parts requests for motor mounts (for the two motors we have been using for the roller and conveyor belt) and power banks (as previously we noticed that our current power bank can not simultaneously supply power to the Jetson Nano Orin
and the Raspberry Pi). I spent a significant amount of time running the robot through different tests to check the durability and consistency of the pick up mechanism last week (also to observe any issues with the mechanism & overall integration of the robot), and so did not spend as much time on the integration this week. Some issues were seen during testing right before our final presentation – this was primarily with the conveyor belt not being sturdy enough and the motors falling off. I installed the conveyor belt motor and fixed up issues with that, so it can work more consistently. Besides this, I updated our Team E4 Embellisher website, so that it can really demonstrate our vision with this robot and the project. A lot of new changes have been made and this can be seen through the website pages.
My progress is on schedule. Our updated schedule was provided in the final presentation, and the primary tasks that are left over are finishing up any minor issues with integration and fine tuning the robot such that it can pick up trash while moving. During testing, I noticed that the robot can pick up components pretty easily when it is stationary and the component is a slight distance away; picking up while moving requires a bit more fine tuning so that the component is picked up at the right time. Video examples of testing are given near the bottom of this post as well as in the team post.
After discussing with our TA, I also decided that it would be best to hard-code coordinates for the path planning algo. In the demo location (most likely the gym), and in general, gps modules do not work as optimally as expected, and since for this particular project, the module’s main purpose is to provide coordinates between relatively small distances, I decided to move forward with hard-coded coordinates for the “coming back home” algorithm. In the next week, I hope to work with the rest of the team to finish integration and fully wrap up everything with the robot – from integration to final testing and documentation – for the demo included.
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