Red Cohort:

Explore TEAMS Robotics Seminar

Plan of Operation/Execution

Team Members:

Objective:

Navigate a Museum given only a painted white line with a completely black enviorment. Bonus! for stopping periodically to look at the paintings.

Plan of Action:

We decided to use the photoresistors in order to detect the different levels of light so that we could govern our cricket, allow/tell it to act a certain way according to the current value of light. We also planned to have it stop both actuators after a selected period of time.

Action Taken:

We first tested both actuators in order to have the cricket as a whole be able to run straight. After completeing the "Simple Tasks", we moved on to attaching the light sensors with the purpose of governing our cricket using light values which we read with the attached digital LED board. We initially set a value of 220 as a reactant so that as the cricket wandered off the line of white the immediate reaction would be to auto-correct by applying less speed to the left servo actuator causing the right to overpower and correct the vehicle. After a few test we decided it would be safer to attach two light sensors so that if the vehicle wandered off to the right the new sensor (sensor B) would auto-correct and speed up the left servo actuator in order to adhere to the arched Museum trail. Currently we are attempting to use the InfraRed sensors.

Experienced Issues:

We experienced several cases where the servo actuators wouldn't run straight which led to the consistant changing and swapping of actuators. Second we delt with a transmitter that wouldn't download the code to the cricket. Our code also suffered from our novice abilities with the language, this is proved by Janna's consistant presence at our station. We delt with issues recognizing light changes, numerically, setting our requirment for notice and change at near-accurate readings. This was a total experimental and learning experience in robotics.