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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Result
During our presentation, our robot was successful in stopping once it had detected the chemical signature.