In a team of 5, we designed this robot to compete in MIT's MASLAB competition over the month of January. The aim was to navigate around a map, collecting colored balls and then deposit the balls at their appropriate goals (each color goes to a different goal location). Our approach differed from the other teams in that we aimed to collect all of the balls in one sweep of the course, internally sorting them according to their color. Other teams attempted to collect only one color of ball at a time... this made our solution more mechanical! And I ended up working on the mechanical design of our robot, Aldo... We used the conveyor belt to draw balls up the ramp and then we had a little cup to hold the balls in place while the sensor identified its color and the gate was opened to the appropriate position to put the balls into the correct channel. Unfortunately, we had some last minute failures in our control system architecture, which we couldn't debug in time for the competition, so Team Funskilled did not get any points... However, we did get to demo our ball collection and sorting mechanism, for which we won an Innovation in Design prize. |
I also was responsible for Aldo's Computer Vision, implementing a color segmentation method, so he could find all the balls, the lights which released the balls into the playing field and the goals he had to shoot the balls into. The computer vision function passed the coordinates of each target to the hierarchical controller, which would navigate Aldo safely to his target location. Here are some examples of Aldo successfully finding his target and drawing a bounding box and a centroid onto it!
Sometimes the team would play with Aldo while we were building him... but we called it "testing".
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