Introduction
Today there was an Engineering Leads meeting. The leads talked about the upcoming weeks and the plans for what should be done. By next Tuesday all prototypes have to done and ready to present. At Tuesday’s meeting, we will vote on the best prototypes. The other deadlines will be available on the team calendar. Also on Wednesdays, the build time will be changed to be from 6 pm – 9 pm. Additionally, The drill press stand should be done tomorrow.
Active Intake
The team did a little bit of work on the active intake today. The team decided that the bumper did not need to be behind the active. This gives us more room to intake the power cubes. The bumper that was on our prototype was removed. The team also adjusted the things that stick out the side of the robot so that they were less than 28 inches. This allows them to fit in our frame width. This adjustment will change the angles of the front part but not by enough to change how the active works. There was some other fine-tuning work that was finished. The CAD has also been started and worked on. The CAD is mostly the only thing that needs to be done and maybe some more fine tuning and adjusting.
Programming
Today programmers worked more on Pure Pursuit. It is starting to get smoother and smoother, and it can be seen that the robot can now rotate and move. However, it is still deviating far enough from the waypoint-based trajectory that it is forced to stop. This is because it cannot find any goal points within the given look ahead distance. Oddly, when the robot is supposed to go straight it initially rotates. This might be due to a number of reasons, but most probably it could be because of:
- Inversion somewhere in motor-related code (something should be multiplied by -1). This would cause the robot to rotate when it should go straight
- The robot thinking it is not where it really is.
- Tomorrow we will test the estimation of absolute robot location in teleop to provide insight into this issue
We also crushed some other issues today as well. Both a mag and quadrature encoder were on the robot which would have led to problems since they have different resolutions. However, this really was a problem because the quadrature encoder was not connected to the robot at all (chain + cable = not happy cable). This caused the location estimation function that used left and right encoder values to give wrong data.
A side note: trajectories can get more complicated (and fun) when more minute details are considered. There is a paper that has been briefly looked over and will most likely serve as a foundation for upcoming trajectory improvements.
CAD
Today, the CAD team’s decision to send in the drivetrain drawings on Tuesday was vetoed by the engineering leads and captains, who instead opted to send in the sidebars immediately, and send them back and front on Tuesday, when it will be confirmed that the drivetrain will or will not require a hole in the frame.
Isaac W made drawings of the sidebars and sent them in.
Something Crazy
Coming soon…