Week 2

As week two has come to a close, the Riddle Rascals have made significant progress on their project. To begin, Jason Chong and Tanner Reznicek made great progress in finalizing the CATIA model and ordering parts that are required to complete the fabrication of the platform base. Next week they hope that the parts that they ordered come in so that they can continue to fabricate the platform base for parts to be mounted to.

Next, Karl Pruhsmeier has greatly assisted in the team’s part ordering process by creating a standardized order form that is used to submit part orders to Jim Weber. Karl has also been spending time assisting Jaya Nwobu in developing and completing pseudo code for the odometry software. Karl then began on developing a simulated model of the robot in MATLAB, which will be used to help visualize the control programs being developed for the physical robot.

Trent Gardner has been working to write code and develop the parts needed for the motor decoders.

The team of Haris Tyeb and Gabe Bentz, is working on Open CV and has one computer running Open CV on Windows and has begun familiarization and testing with the Open CV software. Currently, the team is able to obtain a live stream of video from the webcam to be used on the project. Code is currently being researched and developed to perform basic edge detection on the stream. This will lead to the capability to distinguish the edges of sidewalks and gain the location of the robot. The team is also working on integrating Open CV onto a Linux computer. This will allow them to familiarize themselves with how the code and software will operate on the MiniBox computer that will be placed on the robot platform, which using a Linux operating system. Next week the Open CV team intends to have completed code for edge analysis of a video stream. From there they will begin using the information obtained to develop localization techniques in order to give the robot information on its location based on edge analysis of sidewalks. This progress will be dependent on the amount of open source code available and whether additional software will have to be installed and implemented to allow for the increased functionality of Open CV.

Brigette Cochran has completed work on the Gantt chart used to schedule events for the semester. This chart will be extremely useful for keeping the team on time for task completions. Brigette has also been working with Trent Wargo to develop schematics for the electronic system in order to determine proper connections with all electronic circuits. The schematics will also be used to develop the PCBs in the future. Finally, Brigette and Trent Have completed a working prototype of an H-Bridge. They have ordered the final parts needed to complete testing and should soon start on PCBs for both H-bridges that are needed.