The Beginnings of a Robot

To begin with, we looked at what our options were and then strategised. We decided to use the motors and custom motor brackets from a previous robot, as they were worked well on our PiWars robot last year.


Our aim for this session was to create a drivable robot. We used Solidworks to design a simple chassis with holes to bolt on the motors, pi and batteries. We made it out of clear orange acrylic which we cut out on the laser cutters at Cambridge Makespace.


Once we had assembled the robot, we used the code off of the previous robot to drive it about and ended up with a successful robot. 








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Artistic Design

Image
  To fit in with the disaster theme, we decided to theme the robot after a beat up land rover or jeep. We designed the chassis in CAD, and 3D printed it, before applying paint. We started with a filler -primer to try and fill in some of the layer lines and prep it for painting, before covering it with a chrome layer.  Next we used vaseline to protect areas of silver, before painting it all orange and washing the vaseline off.  This created a chipped paint effect, but also stripped some of the chrome paint, revealing the dull orange primer, making the car seem rusted. Although this was not our intention, it worked out quite well. We chose to do a bright orange overcoat, as it has connotations of danger.
Read more

Autonomous Barrel Collecting

We decided to tackle the Eco-Disaster Challenge autonomously using a Raspberry Pi camera and the  OpenCV library for image processing. First we calibrate for the different colours the colour needs to recognise. Next, the  script initialises the robot's control interface, stops the robot, and sets the operational mode. Camera configuration is set up, including preview format and size. Main Loop: The main loop captures images from the camera and analyzes them to detect objects of interest based on calibrated colors. It alternates between searching for red/yellow and green/blue objects. It moves the robot towards the detected object and performs specific actions (like grabbing or placing) depending on the mode. Movement Control: move_towards: Moves the robot towards the detected object, adjusting its trajectory based on colour detection and distance. Colour Detection: The method begins by capturing an image from the camera using self.take_photo(picam). The image is processed to d...
Read more