Project - Meeting 4

Date: 24-05-2012

Attendants: Jeppe, Thomas & Stefan
Duration: 4 hours

Goal

• Continue designing and building both types of robots
• Plan construction of track

Plan

Jeppe will be working on the Grabber robot.  Stefan will continue the work on the stacking robot, Thomas will be documenting the process.
We will have to acquire a base track and some white paint for it.

Results

Stacking robot:

We decided to try experiments with long tracks mounted on the robot before redesigning the robot with shorter tracks. It is interesting to see if we can construct the ramps so the robot can climb them even though the tracks has low friction or maybe change the tracks in some way in order to improve their friction. Our stacking robot without the ramp attached to is depicted below.

Our first try to create a ramp that the robot had to climb went as follows:

As is evident from the video the tracks do not have enough friction when the robot is only on the ramp. We discussed a few solutions to this. In order to improve friction we would like to add rubber to the ramp or the tracks as we know rubber has better friction. It is not that easy to change the tracks as the rubber tracks are shorter than what we currently use so we decided to change the ramp so that it has two rows of rubber on each side of the ramp. This gives rise to the following trial video:

The robot can now climb the ramp, but it needs to be very precise when driving up the ramp. In order to make it easier for the robot we have changed the ramp so that it has a railing on each side. It is now easier for the robot as can be observed on the following video:

Grapper robot:

We changed the design of the robot so it uses short rubber tracks. This is in order to improve its friction.

Track construction:

We have painted the bottom of the track white today.

For the track, we still need a black line which the robots can use to navigate after, a tower, a bridge and a basket. Before we can do that the paint will have to dry first.

Conclusion

The grabbing robot is now working as it should. We still need to work on the design of the stacking robot - or at least build a copy of the one that we have now since we will need two of those robots.

The base of the track is painted and we are ready to mount the rest of the track on the base.