Week 10 - September 12-18

The tasks accomplished this week were set by the team during our meeting at the beginning of the week. Throughout the week I worked on chapters 1 and 2 of the written report. The biggest change of note is that we discovered another robot that is similar in function to the Rover. Research was conducted to show the differences and similarities between the two robots. This information was then added to chapter one of the report under the similar products section. Figure 10.1 shows the robot that Jesus discovered during a stay at Universal's Aventura hotel.

Figure 10.1 - Savioke Relay

The Relay is an autonomous service robot design to deliver small items to specific rooms in hotels and/or hospitals. The main advantages that the Rover has over Relay is that the rover has a greater carrying capacity, it has direct following capabilities, and the Rover can easily follow a user into a new space while Relay must have a 3D map of every room and hall in which it is going to move. After adding Relay to our report, I continued with chapter 2 by adding in information about the background research associated with each hardware module. Next week, the software module section will be worked on.

The next task worked on is the user control module device. This is the device that the user will clip to their belt/pocket and will allow the Rover to follow them within 2m. First, a 3D model of both the Polulu IR Beacon Transceiver and the 9V battery pack were made. From these models, a prototype of the case that will hold each device was made. The first rendition of the case was found to fit a little too well. Being too tight would made it difficult to reach the battery for replacements as needed. With this need in mind, some changes were made to the design to make it easier to reach both the battery compartment and the on/off switch which are opposite sides of each other. A small hole was added so that the user could push the battery pack from the back of the case for easy removal. The second iteration of this device is currently printing on the 3D printer.

The next task worked on this week was writing the code for the motor drivers. Figure 10.2 shows how the secondary board will receive a code from the primary board and from that will tell each motor driver how to turn each motor. The code shown in Figure 10.3 is the first draft of how the drivers will handle this task. Each driver only controls two motors and so while there is one code written, the unnecessary lines will be commented out for the appropriate driver.

Figure 10.2 - Shared data between devices

Figure 10.3 - First Iteration of Motor Driver program

Each line of code tells each motor which direction it should spin and how fast. Notice that there exist 4 directions in which the cart can currently move. Two more directions will be added; strafe right and strafe left. Only the four directions currently shown will be available to the user during manual control, but strafing will be utilized by the Rover during obstacle avoidance.