Week 19 - November 14-20

This week we focused on troubleshooting our system. The first thing we did was to place the cart up on some paint cans so that none of the wheels were touching the ground. This allowed us to test the systems operability without having weight as a factor. Video 19.1 shows the test of the manual operation which allows the user to move the Rover wherever it needs to go. You can see in the video that the wheels are turning in the appropriate direction according to which arrow the user pushes. This is an improvement from last week when the user had to press left or right to go forward or back.

Video 19.1 - Testing Manual Control - No Load

Now that we verified that the manual control was working, we tested the 'Blind' Bluetooth following which means that the Rover does not know in which direction the user went and is simply trying to move towards the user. In Video 19.2, you can see that the Rover is able to decern when the user walks away from it and will begin to try and find them by moving forward. If the signal gets weaker then the Rover will try different directions until the signal gets stronger. Once the user is within range the Rover will stop moving.

Video 19.2 - 'Blind' Bluetooth tracking/following

Next, we tested the object avoidance operation. Using a piece of cardboard as our 'obstacle' we were able to isolate the sensor that we wanted to 'see' something. Video 19.3 explains what is happening within the test and video 19.4 is the test results. It can be seen that the Rover is acting as we intended, where it attempts to move away from the obstacle while preferring to move forward if possible.

Video 19.3 - Object Avoidance Test part 1

Video 19.4 - Object Avoidance Test part 2

The next tests that were conducted, involved placing the cart on the ground and testing the manual operation with a load. As Video 19.5 shows, the Rover is able to move forward and backward with no issues. The Rover also moves at an acceptable speed. However, when we attempted to turn the Rover, none of the wheels turned. We next tried to increase the PWM length, which increases the power to the motors. After doing this, the wheels on the right side of the cart started to move but the wheels on the left still did not move. In the future we will try to increase the power, giving it more torque and hopefully allowing the Rover to turn.

Video 19.5 - Manual Control Load Test