Check out or Week 2 Recap Video!
Our main focus during week 2 has been prototyping. The first thing we did was test our first shooter prototype, and it worked wonderfully. The intro shot of the week 2 recap video was shooting from the terminal, and easily making the upper hub shots. It was more of a proof of concept, but gave us the data that we needed to begin working on the next shooter prototype. One problem that the first prototype had was how we fed the cargo into it (manually), and we wanted our next prototype to actually be fed from a transfer mechanism. Conveniently enough, we had been designing and prototyping a transfer just for that purpose. There was a slight hiccup in the transfer prototype, and due to a miscommunication we were trying to use 3" of compression, but that got sorted out quickly enough, and before we knew it we had a highly functional first transfer prototype.
Our new shooter prototype was a much smaller hooded design, and it was put on rails, so we could adjust the angle of the shot. We could mount it on top of the transfer prototype so the variation of human feeding was no longer present, plus it gave a more accurate height for shooter to be mounted. This shooter also featured powered rollers on the hood. Unfortunately, due to some calculation errors, this shooter had too much of a gear reduction (2.25:1) and could not make the same terminal shot that our last shooter could. This shooter could make fender shots extremely quickly and reliably though. With a minor modification, we will be able to test some different gear ratios to find out what works.
On the software side of things, we have been working on the most important element of any robot: RGB lighting. We had an idea to match the color of an LED strip to the color of a cargo, and with the help of a color sensor that was pretty easy to do, and it yielded some pretty cool results (also in the week 2 recap).
Our 2022 shooter Prototype
Our intake, transfer, and Shooter Prototype
Written By: Ian Szalai