Weekly Updates

Week 3 Update

The design has been decided on, with a clamp and threaded rod being the gripping mechaism on a tower that comes from the scanners that are available to us. The tower will be on an XY Plotter that will have an additional lazy susan that will allow for accesss to all outside blocks on three sides of the tower.

Week 4 Plan

Materials need to be collected and assembly needs to start. The clamp should be constructed by next week. Motor testing is being started as well as computer vision.

Week 4 Update

We have scavenged two scanners to account for our tower (up and down movement) and approaching the Jenga tower. A threaded rod will be utilized to finish the XY plotter. The clamp has been 3D printed to decrease the weight and the arms have been extended so that reaching the fourth side of the tower is now possible.

We have figured out how to drive the stepper motors at different speeds and directions. We can also control DC motors in different directions as well as change the position of a servo. Electrically, that is the hard part of this system. All that is left to do is actually assemble the full circuit and receive sensor input into our Arduino.

The third party Windows driver for the PS3 eye camera did not work with Visual Studio: OpenCV still could not recognize the camera. We are currently trying to make a live bootable Ubuntu drive with persistent storage to work with UEFI.

Week 5 Plan

A platform will be built for the tower and the clamp will be machined so that the motor driving the shaft will be held steady. Create persistent storage drive to work with EFI machines, and begin applying edge detection.

Week 5 Update

This week the motor control board has been built and soldered. Previously only a singular motor was being controlled on a breadboard. The new protoboard is much sturdier and can drive up to four stepper motors. Images and more details can be found under testing media.

The tower is almost completed and the clamp is assembled, it just needs to be coupled to the motor. The tower still needs a counterweight attached over the top of it because the stepper motor is designed to push in a linear direction not pull vertically.

A bootable Ubuntu drive with persistent storage that works with EFI systems was made. With the linux system, the PS3 eye camera is now easily recognized and OpenCV was used to achieve edge detection on the video feed.

Week 6 Plan

Next week work will continue on the IR sensors. There has been mixed success so far and they should be working properly soon.

The entire structure should be build with the only exception being the left and right movement because it is a subcomponent that can be added easily later. With the structure in place edge detection and sensing can start to be tested for accuracy.

Week 6 Update

For computer vision, we take still images from the camera and convert them to grayscale and do gaussian smoothing. We then use edge detection and locate rectangular contours. Once the pixel coordinates of the contours are found, the objective is to sample interior pixel values, but this does not work yet.

The XY Plotter is almost finished, it needs to be mounted along with the tower so that testing can occur. That will be done in the next couple days.

The simple IR sensors we have may be sensitive to sunlight. We will conduct more tests to see if they are reliable in direct sun. If not, we have a secondary type of IR sensor that relies on pulses of IR light, so it might filter out constant IR such as the sun.

Week 7 Plan

Once we can sample pixel values, we will compare images from before and after a block is removed, and set a threshold for the pixel value so that the robot can determine which block has been removed. Then, it should be able to tell the microcrontroller which block it has selected to remove.

Once everything is mounted then the swivel mechanism will be the focus. The idea is to have a small lazy Susan on the platform so that the clamp can rotate 90 degrees to either side in order to get any outside block from the jenga tower.

Continued work on sensors and code.

Week 7 Update

The robot is ready to be tested. It is assembled and able to go up and down, forward, and backward, and clamp. The testing has started and there are issues to work out. The first problem that was noticed was that if the forward and backward motion was dependent on only one side being driven then it wasn't going to move straight. This could be remedied by driving it from both sides, pushing it with a linear actuator from the center, or making the frame more robust.

Sensors are working and able to detect proximity of the jenga tower. It will look for an open space, then move in the width of one block to make sure it is there so the tower does not collapse.

Week 8 Plan

Testing will bring out the problems with our design so now it is testing and fixing. Timing will be the main thing and then if it works we are going to add complexity, the swivel mechanism and left to right motion will be added.

Week 8 Update

The entire design was changed in the last week. The XY Plotter was thrown out and a base with wheels was used instead. The clamp was 3D printed again for accuracy and to shorten the length of it. There was a mechanism that allowed the clamp to go out and down to reach the bottom levels of the Jenga tower, however it put too much weight on the tower so it was removed.

Week 9 Plan

Testing to figure out what needs to be adjusted.