Below is the video of our prototype launcher that I mentioned yesterday. It goes 27.5 feet far. We are going to run an overlay program on the video to determine the drag coefficient of air and integrate this into our kinematics equations.

We may end up creating a large table (approx 756 values) with experimentally determined values for velocity and vertical launch angle. This would give us an easy way to determine how we need to launch the ball during the competition.

We did more machining today, consisting of plastic electronics mounts, bearing plates, etc.

We also started putting the base frame together with rivets so we could take it to the welder. Unfortunately, he was unavailable today, but said he would get to it by Tuesday.

We bought a 4X4 sheet of 3/4″ plywood today to start building bumpers. The McMaster order arrived, so we quickly got to work on those parts. As usual, there was more and more machining today. Because it is Friday, convinced our supervisor to stay late so we could continue working into the night.

We are experimenting with some new gallery options to display images on this website. Look out for some neat JQuery applications!

The old test bot

Today, we got to prototyping a mechanism to launch the balls to test for air resistance. This will not be exactly like our main robot (for simplicity) but will give us a good estimation for the variables we are solving for. We have a few extra hands, so we also made some cool blue door stops.

We continued machining and took some awesome pictures along the way. Also, we tested the ball detection sensors again and made a track to experiment with.

After going through some more math, we found a way to detect our distance from the target with only one webcam. There is a very simple method for calculating distance if you know the vision angle of your webcam. Now, all we need to do is calculate the displacement to the hoop from the backboard in order to score.

Today, we made significant progress on code. It is now running a lot faster. We will post a video tomorrow of how fast it is. It looks as though it is essentially a real-time video. We brought in two other ideas on how to calculate the robot’s distance from the target. Earlier, we calculated the ideal launching speed and angle given the ‘x’ distance away. Below is a picture of one way to account for skew. The other two ideas involve projected geometry.

As you can probably tell by the pictures, we continued machining the drive-train and sent out complex parts to be machined. The basic frame is coming together. Later this week we plan on getting the pieces welded together.

Today, we continued machining the drive train for the two robots. Things slowed down a little bit, as you can probably tell by the shorter posts.  We got some cool equations to detect “z” distance from the target from just one camera.

We plan on getting welds done later this week. Also, there was some wind during the day and our tarp came off of our basket ball hoop structure. Luckily we put it back before the next rainstorm.

We found some nice photogate sensors that we plan on using to detect when balls come into our robot.  We made it into a ball counter so it adds 1 when a ball comes in and subtracts 1 when a ball leaves the robot.

The webcams we are using

The drive-train is being built!