Doo do doo doo
A lot has happened the last few months. The robot club started their build and finished just about 6 weeks later, ending with their final creation, Hank. He did good at Arizona, but succumbed to a few problems (bad wiring, not enough driver practice, etc) and didn’t quite make the cut for eliminations. However, they’ve still got Las Vegas to look forward to, and I’m sure they’ll do much better with the experience they’ve gained in Phoenix. As a side note, myself and my brothers got in contact with a newly formed FIRST team here in Tucson, 3194 from Tucson High. We helped during the last few weeks, and they ended their first FIRST regional as finalists with 3 metals! They also managed to get in to the Vegas regional as a late entry, so they’ll be competing with the NERDS this weekend.
School here at the UA is going okay as well. I’m only taking 14 units this semester, and it’s a breeze compared to last year. All of my classes are finished before 11 every day, so I seem to have plenty of time for being lazy.
I was sitting in front of my computer screen today (as I am prone to do every day to no end) and was reminiscing about the engineering science fair I was in last year. We built an inertial navigation system using the Lego NXT platform and a 3rd party accelerometer. It didn’t really work at all, so I was thinking of ways to make a reliable system that FIRST teams like the NERDS could use. Using a gyro or compass (I’m not sure which is more accurate, I’ve heard gyros tend to drift) and a quadrature encoder, you could relatively accurately keep track of the position of the robot on the field, and subsequently make functions to move to various locations. Some pseudo-code for those interested:
getPosition()
{
double angle = getGyroHeading()
double distance = getEncoderDistance()
double curX = cos(angle)*distance
double curY = sin(angle)*distance
posX += curX
posY += curY
resetEncoder()
}
Essentially, you take the distance you’ve traveled since the last iteration of the loop and add the components of that displacement to the total displacement with respect to the field. The only way this would be considered unreliable is if the wheels slip. The target for this would be autonomous though, so you can assume for all intents and purposes that it will not. I really want to test this and create something useful, but at the moment I have neither an encoder, a gyro, or a robot – all very useful for testing purposes. So I suppose I’ll have to wait… Maybe once summer starts and the NERDS do their summer vex camps I work with them on it.
That’s about all I’ve got..
Yup.
