Riddle Rascals: Week 14

The Robot: Constructed but still being programmed

This week, Trent Wargo was working on assembling the electronics on the robot. The smaller Jupiter battery now powers the electronics tower which provides power to the Beaglebone and mini box. All connections are secure and working to power both of these devices. The larger NAPA battery now powers the H-bridge, logic boards and both motors. All power switches will be attached to the outer shell to be accessed by the outside. For this reason, Trent has installed several Anderson Plugs that are capable of handling high current and can be disconnected in order to completely remove the outer shell with the electronics reaming attached to the shell. Trent intends to continue interfacing the electronics with the robot.

For the last two weeks Haris has worked on parts of a Calibration code in MATLAB. This code will not autonomously calibrate the cameras when 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 for 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.

Derivation of PNP for vision system

Haris has applied different inputs for the testing phase and tried computing the vectors and transformation matrices with different unit measurements of length. It appears that in the original code the number of cells of the images taken for the calibration test were incorrect. The newer version of the code is within ten percent of error when calculating the distance of the vector aligning the measured features. Dr. Isenberg is suggesting refining the code to compute all vectors and angles to be within one percent of marginal error.

Gabe spent the week completing the localization method for the vision system. The program is now capable of determining the robot's distance from the edge of any given sidewalk to within an accuracy of about 0.5 inches.

Gabe will spend the next week implementing the vision system with the rest of the control system and hardware.

Brigette helped integrate the odometry code with Karl. She designed a PCB that will be used to mount the decoder chips along with the necessary logic to make the decoders work. She aided Karl is developing code where she could. Also, she looked into possible solutions to get the GPS and IMU integrated into the system. She and Trent Wargo checked out a small, accurate IMU and GPS unit from Dr. Bruder and she is looking into possible solutions to integrate the data taken from this more accurate unit, into the current control code.

Karl was responsible for verifying the output of the odometer, when tested on Tour-PNADDER itself. Originally, the odometer was set up to simply reset once the encoder’s count limit was reached, and subsequently rolled over. Karl ensured that the count remained continuous as soon as a roll over was detected. He has also tested PWM output to the h-bridges, which was met with success. As such, he is now incorporating pwm signal change into the system, to ensure that the pwm signal is modified as the minibus server code sends new values

Here are some pictures of the work that we have done.