Daily+Log


 * Tuesday, August 30, 2011**

Drew and I(Chris) began building our NXT robot for the Golf Ball Delivery Challenge. We used a very simplistic design for attaching the wheels to the motors and the motors to the NXT block. We attempted to accomplish a minimalist design, using as few pieces as possible. We decided that using less pieces would keep the overall width of our robot, as well as it's hight, as small as possible. Having accomplished the general movement of the NXT robot, we installed some slider plates on the bottom of the NXT block allowing smooth turning. We then turned our attention to the issue of obtaining the golf ball from the heightened platform. Our original design of using a claw was scrapped when we discovered that the hight required for the claw mechanism would not enable our robot to go underneath the obstacles. We went back to the drawing board and decided in favor of a very simplistic forklift mechanism which would allow us to barely but surely navigate underneath the obstacle.



Above - Our simplistic wheel design To the Right - Our simplistic forklift design

Chis S and I(Drew) started the class with the problem how are we going to take the forklift design and attach it to the NXT core. We had the idea that it could be attached in between the wheel and the NXT on one side of the robot. We realized that attaching the motor between the wheel and the NXT would make the robot too wide to program with such a small degree of error. Next we realized that we should use the bottom part of the NXT to hold the forklift. After our first attempt at using the robot we saw that the forklift was sagging a few centimeters in the front and could not reach the full hight of the brick. We then gave it support by adding a few support beams through the top of the motor. After another test we still realize that there is still a few centimeters of sagging with the motor at the front. Our plan is to use some of the pieces to support it from the bottom with solid pieces instead of just trying to pull it up. This should help get rid of the lost centimeters and keep the forklift in the best possible position for grabbing and holding the golf ball.
 * Wednesday, August 31, 2011**

Today we realized that our support pieces would not fully help the motor up by itself. To fix this problem we added a piece on the bottom of the support so that it was touching the ground and give it the full support it needed. This helped the motor stay flat and perfectly level. We also started our programing today and was on the right track of designing the software. Although we have been running tests on how the robot will be picking the ball up we have not fully constructed a complete program of how the robot would move.It's is only a rough outline but it is on its way. We ran through it once on the ground and was not able to test it out on the track quite yet. We started the program with the idea of our robot going around the obstacle so the robot would go forward, pick up the ball, move backward, rotate 90 degrees, move forward, rotate 90 degrees, move forward, and finally drop the ball of into the container.
 * Thursday****, August 1, 2011**

We attempted to modify our design today to minimize the risk of our tires getting stuck on the side of the course and throwing our robot off balance. Charlie M joined me(Chris) and Drew M today and came up with the design below. The bars on the bottom allow our robot, even if the tires slip off of the course to continue it's run. These replaced our other design of having two block sliders support the back-weight of the robot.
 * Friday, August 2, 2011**

Today we pretty much just tinkered with the software degrees, and moreover the speed at which our motors will run. Since we continually experienced slippage while our robot was turning, we decided to lower the motor power to increase the precision of the turn. We did our first trial today, however due to improper alignment, our robot fell of the table (it was caught). Tomorrow we will continue to perfect our software precision.
 * Tuesday, September 5, 2011**

Success! Today was our second trial and we successfully transported the golf ball into the container. We spent most of the day running trials with our new ramped sliders design that we came up with yesterday. Through many trials the design proved successful even before we delivered the golf ball. Most of the work we did was on the about of degree we needed for the motors to turn the robot. With about 15 minuets left we finally discovered the right degree to turn the robot and successfully but the ball into the container. We then proceeded to start our second trial and it preformed exactly like the first time. Now that we have completed the course we will mainly use tomorrow to decrease our time so that we can earn the extra points.
 * Wednesday, September 6, 2011**

Both pictures are final designs for our robot


 * Thursday, September 8, 2011**

Since we have already completed the course (we were the first of our class), with a respectable time (3rd best in both classes, 1st in our class), we decided to just tinker and mess with the NXT kit. We made a design for a robot which can run on four wheels, in one direction, with a single motor using gear boxes we found in our spare NXT kit.