Entry 7

Today we plan to continue the progression of what each subteam was working on in the past meeting.

• The Hardware Team continues working on the Mecanum Wheel Drive.

The Programming Team fixes and figures out all the problems encountered on Floobits to work on the program.

• It is a bit of a challenge to implement EasyOpenCv due to the lack information about the setup process. We conduct a sufficient amount of trial and errors over the past week which result in a success.

• In the future we will like to complete the program using the OpenCV. Our goal is to make the robot move forward until it reaches the rings, stop, and move back 5 times.

• The Robot Design Team plans to finish all the separate assemblies of chassis and then attach them together.

  • • When building the Mecanum Wheel Drive we learn that certain assemblies can just be copied and flipped 180 degrees to be attached to the opposite side. the Strafer Chassis is symmetrical thus this safe technique can be applied.

Today we make improvements to the base chassis design and finish working on the two Mecanum Wheels assemblies.

Along with that, we assemble the motor pieces together. These are the last assemblies we need to finish, now all that's left to do is put all the pieces together.

We have difficulties lining up our parts. Overall, we have gotten much better at finding parts. We also learn tips on how to line up parts.

Compared to other days our communication today largely improves.

• • We don't hesitate to let each other know if we were unsure of what to do or didn't understand where to find a part or fasten parts together. By doing so, we learn tips and tricks from each other which we plan to utilize in further meetings.

Our plan for next meeting is to assemble all the different parts of the chassis together and attach the wheels and motors.

• • Now that all the separate parts of the robot are almost done, assembling it together should be an easy process.

Our goal this meeting is to learn more about OpenCV.

• • We watch a video on OpenCV and how to identify rings using it.

  • We start programming the robot to use OpenCV.

So far, we haven’t tested this program, so we don’t know exactly what doesn’t work and what does. However, there aren’t any obvious errors, and everything looks like it should work so far.

Implementing EasyOpenCv is a bit of a challenge, since there isn’t much documentation on the setup process, so we run into a few hurdles. However, with enough trial and error over the past week, we make it work.

We don't work on the same program for the whole week as the programming objective changes a lot. When beginning the work, our objective is to make the robot go in a square using different methods than the ones we had used before. However, by the end of the week, our task is to make the robot recognize a certain object using a certain technique, and build our program from there. We learn a lot of problem-solving skills over the course of the week.