Urban Search and Rescue (USAr)

Designed a robot to complete a series of tasks efficiently and competed against other robots

To go over the obstacles, we designed our robot to have large, custom-printed wheels and a large ground clearance, which allowed us to go over most of the rubble
The robot was also required to go up and down ramps and stairs, which we accomplished by adjusting the position of the center of mass of the robot.

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We were required to pick up "survivors," or small LEGO structures, and drop them off in specified locations. We accomplished this by using a simple lifter design.

Because the competition was teleoperated, we were allowed to use a camera to detect obstacles and relay information
To combat the dark setting, we used a high-power LED and a separate power source
To give a competitive advantage, we designed a servo-mounted camera mount, which allowed us to swivel the camera and see more angles

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The recommended control scheme was to use keyboard inputs, because they can be transmitted through terminal. However, we thought that keyboard controls were unintuitive and gamepad controls gave more exact control for a competitive advantage
To accomplish this, we set up a server on the pi and ran client code on our laptop, which allowed us to connect a USB controller to the laptop and transmit commands to the pi
For safety in case of wifi outages, we had a kill switch that would shut down the motor power after some amount of time without a command

As part of the specified tasks, we were required to detect and interpret fiducial images to decode a message.
For efficiency, we decided to screenshot the laptop screen showing the camera feed rather than taking an image from the pi

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