Week 12

The Primary Chassis

In the past week we have received what will hopefully be our interfacing tablet. Karl has been researching how to interface the table with the minibox, so that it can serve as the user console to control desired position of the robot, and to start and stop the program itself. Karl also helped Tanner become familiar with the currently developed code(s) and the projected system flow, so that he could begin putting every thing together appropriately. The decoders were causing a lot of problems, so not much progress has been made it that department, but Gardner did return on Friday, and thinks to have fixed whatever the bug was. Hopefully now,  proper testing of the odometry can be conducted. 


This week Brigette has been sick but still put effort into debugging the H-Bridge. She redesigned the Logic board and had that printed. The logic board is now consistently outputting the correct data values. She also redesigned the H-Bridge and had that printed. After soldering the new H-Bridge components together, the motor is spinning due to logic from the H-Bridge but there is way too much current being drawn from the supply. She is aiming to completely debug the H-Bridge over the weekend so the team can test the robot software.
Gabe has spent the last week working to implement an alternate version of the PNP localization into the vision system. Currently the system is not performing as expected. The localization is set to be completed on April 6, so Gabe will spend the weekend completing the implementation.

This week Trent Wargo worked on the power supply board and got the prototype working. After completing the prototype, he worked on creating a PCB for the power supply. After the first revision of the PCB was made he decided to split the power supply board into several smaller boards to make debugging easier. He successfully designed the PCBs and is finishing soldering all the necessary components to finalize his design.

Jason And Jaya worked on the shell this week. They used the CAD drawing to measure out pieces of the foam and began to cut the foam into the shape and size needed to make the shell mold. Once all the pieces are cut they began to glue the pieces together. Next is for the shell to be completely glued together and sanded into the final shape. then the wet layup will be applied.

For the last two weeks Haris has worked on parts of a Calibration code in MATLAB
which will not autonomously calibrate the cameras if they are moved from their 
initial position with reference to the robot. However, this code is simple enough to 
input a set number of measurements of where the camera is in terms of x, y and z 
coordinates with respect to the robot and the selected marker point in the 
registered images.     

The first part of the code uses Newton’s method and the raphson method to solve 
for the roots of our roots which are three angle values in our camera transformation 
matrix and three values of x, y, and z components of the translational vector from 
the camera frame to the real world frame. The week before this Gabe and I were 
trying to find a solution for the calibration problem in python but we decided to take 
an easier measure as suggested by Dr. Isenberg which was to use initial 
measurements of the camera with respect to the body fixed frame and implement a 
calibration program just once rather than having the robot autonomously calibrate 
the camera every time the robot is powered up.