Today we got close to finishing the rollers for the belts. The bumper mounts are complete and we found some cool resonance when you bump them together (see video below).

We also made significant progress with OpenCV, however it is quite slow compared to the previous custom code.  We will find ways to optimize it for speed later once the functionality is up to par.

As we have access to a large indoor space this Friday, we are building a prototype ball launcher that closely replicates  that of our actual robot to experimentally determine air resistance. While we have done the kinematics for an optimized basketball shot, after some research we found that air resistance could play a role in altering the ball’s position.

As you can see below, we created a cool animated gif image of the frame pieces to give you a glance at what our frame will look like before getting welded. Note that the set of aluminium that holds up the middle section is merely a placeholder.

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.