Wall-E: Tamiya Bot
Gear Boxes
Completed Double Gearboxes
<---- Ashleigh and Avantika's
Anthony's ------------->
The process of building "The Tank"
<-- The baseplate of the tank being added with wheels
The switch that will turn the tank motors on and off when flipped -->
<-- The Double Gearbox was added to the tank with the last set of wheels and plastic tracks
The 4-Box battery has been added to the tank and will be connected to the gearbox
-->
<- The Main Arduino is being connected to the Motor driver which will be both added to the tank when done
The Bread Board is being wired to the Main Arduino in order to make the tank move ->
<- The bumpers, ultrasonic and thermal sensor were added. The tank now only needs to be coded by Arduino in order to use all of it's functions.
Tamiya Bot Test: YouTubeShortsLink
During the programming of the tank, we realized that as soon as the motors are turned on, the ultrasound would stop showing the correct distance. Although all of the cables were reconnected, it still would not work. My guess is that the ultrasound sensors were affected by the vibrations caused by the motors spinning, which caused the errors in the results.
Before After
Therefore, we decided to try using only the thermal and bumper sensors instead. However, neither of these sensors worked either. After numerous attempts to make the bumper sensors on the tank work, it was concluded that while they work on the redbot, they do not work on the tank. While all the parts worked on their own, when they were combined, they stopped working. We could not find out why this happened, otherwise we would have fixed the issue. This is why the robot does not have all of the sensors that were required. After more experimentation we managed to make the robot move forwards and stop before the wall (as shown by the video), however this was only coded and did not use any of the sensors.
Theoretical explanation of code
The picture on the right shows the code that is used to make the robot move, with the -255 referring to moving backwards at maximum speed. The delay ensures that the robot can settle, which helps it stay on path.
Although the code did not fully work in practive, in theory it should work, which will be explained below.
The code on the left was used to set up the motors. The first part imports the library used to make coding easier for the rest of the code. The second part defines all of the pins that are used on the arduino board, so that all of the sensors and motors are connected properly.
My original plan was to code the ultrasound sensor so that once the robot is within 30cm of a wall, it moves backwards and turn to either the left or the right (based on the touch sensors) which would allow it to navigate the building. The thermal sensor should in theory detect a temperature of above 25°C and then move in a semi circle while taking the temperature at multiple points. The robot would then compare the values and move towards the warmest one, until it reaches a human being.