TASK-ORIENTED ROBOT
Northeastern University
I designed and constructed a robot with the capacity to seek out a chemical signature, seek out a source of light in a dark room, and avoid walls and moving objects.
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All projects within my cornerstone class (introduction to engineering) were designed in the context of National security. The chemical signature detecting robot was representative of a robot sent in to inspect a building for explosives, gas leaks, or strange chemicals.
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For this project, I owned the testing phase. After the code had been written by a team member, I took the robot and ran tests in my dorm room.
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Over the course of this project, I gained experience with simple circuits, Arduino, computer programming, various sensors, AutoCAD, and Solidworks.
My Process
​Problem
Design a robot capable of detecting a chemical signature in a large room, and avoid walls and moving objects. Rubbing alcohol was used to represent a dangerous chemical.
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Action
1. Simple Circuit, ardunio, and code
My team and I designed a simple computer program to communicate with the ardunio board. We took our inputs as initial position, velocity, location, time step, subsequent position.
2. Motion Control
If the robot was outside a given radius, it would check to see if it was near a wall. If so it would rotate a 190 degree angle and check again after 2 seconds. If the robot was not near a wall, it would continue moving forward and check every 1 second.
3. Testing
To ensure that the robot would perform on our presentation day, I ran tests in my dorm room. I noticed that as I tested it, one of the motors was fatiguing faster than the other. This meant that when equal power was sent to both motors, one was turning faster. I corrected this by adjusting the distributed power and informing my teammates.
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Result​
During our presentation, our robot was successful in stopping once it had detected the chemical signature.​