We aren’t finished with our robot yet, but we began the process of building the practice robot parts today. We know certain systems won’t change drastically so we are beginning to manufacture the spare parts that we will use on our practice robot.
The focus for the main robot is now on the controls team both programming and electrical. The electrical will get finished tomorrow or Friday, we ran out of wire and have to get more but we will have it tomorrow. The controls team is working through vision problems and we are now considering off loading the vision processing to a separate computer on the robot. The most likely candidate is a beagleboard-xm running OpenCV. It’s a far more powerful computer than the cRIO that controls the robot and will have no problem doing vision processing at fast enough frame rates for our aiming. However this adds another system that we have to program and another thing that could break on the robot.
The mechanical team is also working on designing some of the body work for the robot, to cover the shooter and other chain runs. Its also nice to have smooth surfaces for our logos and sponsors.
The bridge device started it’s construction process today, it’s sort of a guess and check design. We know the motor setup will work but since we still don’t have a bridge we can’t test the actual device, this is something that may have several iterations before we find one that works as well as we require.
– Allen Gregory
“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results. ” – Andrew Carnegie
