This video shows all of our final testing of the system and summarizes all aspects of the system. Further tests and videos can be found in our google drive media folder, although those videos are not cut down and contain audio from during testing. This site will be updated one final time when we receive our professionally recorded final demonstration video.
Our system was successful in all aspects of its operation during our final performance testing and during the system validation demonstrations. It was capable of climbing and descending consistently without manual interference, as the state machine was designed for the robot to be able to calibrate its location on the stairs with consistency and adjust in real time to different riser heights. The vacuum subsystem was nearly perfect, as during our testing it was picking up the majority of the dirt, dust, and hair which already existed on the stairs, but, unfortunately, during the demonstrations, the coffee grounds ended up being stickier than we anticipated, which led to our suction not being enough to successful clean the stairs; this resulted in us getting a lower score than expected. Regardless, our demonstration was a success as we were able to show it climbing all necessary stairs without manual intervention and within the time constraints (finishing vacuuming all 4 stairs in less than 6 minutes), and it was capable of detecting that it reached the top of the stairs and signaling to the user that it was done by turning the LEDs blue. Furthermore, we met all the requirements of the robot, except for the weight requirement which we significantly exceeded as our robot ended up being closer to 20 pounds. We would recommend to the instructors to increase this weight requirement as all the teams this year ended up exceeding the 10 pounds.