Week 3

Accomplishments and Challenges from the past week:

What was accomplished last week was that the robot concept was presented to a section of the class along with Dr. Hatton. One of the major challenges was finding or designing a base for the robot but since there were Pioneer P3-DX available it was chosen to be the base for our project. Parts for controlling the robot including the Raspberry Pi and camera were bought to be able to wirelessly control the P3-DX robot. There were no major challenges besides picking out the parts we thought we might use along with time being allocated to receive these parts.

Plan for this week:

This week we are going to be testing the P3 robot base with ROS, getting the Raspberry Pi setup to work with ROS, and calculating what needs to be done for our mechanical design. Also, an initial setup for the bean bag loading mechanism for a 3D printed part will be designed to be printed next week.

Some initial calculations were done for the initial bean bag belt drive design and found that with the 1 pound bean bags (~.453 kg) it would require 4 N-m of force to launch it by using two motors that require 48 V along with the necessary motor drivers and other components. There is also the problem of the bean bags getting stuck in the belts, and having each belt align correctly with the others. Therefore, we are starting to research a catapult design (drawings below) as it is potentially easier to implement along with already having an example catapult design (Example Catapult Design video below). The P3 robot base was also shown to work with ROS, and can be controlled with the included laptop.

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