Saturday, September 29, 2012

Project Guidelines – September 29, 2012



To put our projects into a little better focus, here are some new guidelines. 

Please make sure conceptual design reviews, as a minimum, provide cost, detailed schedule, and plastic filament requirements.  Project managers; please provide preliminary cost estimates to me by Monday so I can request funding. 

Please put all presentation and project documentation in the Drop Box folder. 

Mission payload – (a) the spider and rover (tracked vehicle) should be designed to carry the EE444 standard sensor array (2 IR Rangers, Laser, Camera, plus support electronics and power), (b) The Nano-copter to carry one fixed hobby video camera only (all control to be provided from the MC3 or another bot), (c) RoFi to carry an Android phone with mid-range IR ranger replacing the ultrasonic ranger.

3D modeling of new standard sensor array should have already been started. If you have not done so already secure existing 3D models. To meet student friendly requirement, I am tending towards a more autonomous scan/tilt platform, with small Arduino preprocessing IR data, controlling the laser, and camera power on/off. This secondary microcontroller would then communicate with the chassis mounted Arduino over an I2C serial interface. 

Spider – Baseline the hexapod. Every project must balance cost, schedule, and performance. Our schedule is fixed, and I am worried that our low cost solution cannot be reverse engineered, designed, and fabricated in less than 10 weeks.  Therefore, we must accept a little higher cost. With the design decision to go with the hexapod made we can start fabrication of the legs immediately, while designing the interface to the scan/tilt platform.

BiPed – ROFI fabrication should begin immediately. Divisions to provide support necessary to begin 3D design of next generation ROFI immediately.

Tracked Rover – Assume use of Robot Shop components or substitutes (please provide me with a copy of your presentation so I can provide better focus). Assume form factor (key dimensions of existing RobotShop rover) but not shape of existing rover. This will allow 3D dimensional modeling to begin immediately.

Nanocopter – Unfortunately, this bot is still in the research phase.  

No comments:

Post a Comment