Geetings Earthlings!

Left early last night and rushed home to make vision targets. Cut left over luan plywood into 10 inch disks, cut some scrap MDF into 23-3/4" strips. Glued and stapled the disks to the strips. Cut a sheet of thin styrene into 24"x32" pieces and stapled them around the wooden structure. Viola! Targets. Except... Oops, they should have been 8" diameter! Therefore, today's clue is: "Haste makes waste".

Actually, not much wasted. Pulled them apart, recut the disks. Glued, stapled, trimed, stapled some more. Done again!

Painted two this morning with the hot pink target color. It's OK, but not perfect. So...

Since I was ordering bumper fabric from Seattle Fabrics, I also ordered a bit of the magenta and green target fabrics. So we will have the real thing. For the rest of this week you may have to make do with the painted version, though.

A couple of other thoughts:

Most important: We cannot damage the balls in competition. You all have seen how easily the fabric on the balls is damaged. Keep this in mind as we complete the design. Balls cannot sit and rub on drive belts or other components. We could be forced to turn features off if the judges think we're causing damage.

Has anyone been thinking about strategy? Remember that we're starting right in front of an opposing refueling station. What do you think we need to do during autonomous mode???

One final question: How fast do we want the turret to turn? There may be a tradeoff between speed and accuracy. Either could easily be more important. Your thoughts, please!

Dean

We decided on feeding from the bottom and shooting from the top with a hopper to hold all the balls. We drew sketches of ideas for the elevator. The main idea is to have corner posts with braces between them for structure. Weight is estimated to be in the 30 lb. range for the hopper and the elevator.

Sandra, you've gotten very creative with my cursor on our home page. Looks like the path of a robot on Regolith!

I was curious (yes, it sometimes happens) about the wheel tread we used last year, and was wondering where I might find more, and in larger pieces. It has such nice grip on the Moon Rocks! Andymark calls it conveyor belting, so I went to a local material handling supplier who had some belting, but directed me to another place that has LOTS of conveyor belting. I did find the "right stuff" and here is the supplier details:

The material is called "Roughtop".

It comes in 2-ply, 3-ply and 5-ply thicknesses. The 2-ply is what we'll want.

It is available in just about any size.

It can be sliced, spliced and diced to any size, too.

It is made to run agains a smooth metal backing.

And the source is:
McGuire Bearing Company
1053 W Amity Rd
342-2281

Our man there is Doug Tillitt and I'll chat with him more tomorrow when his conveyor belting guy is back in.

And a clue? Rough-top Conveyor Belt!

See you in an hour, or so.

Dean

Last Friday I was looking at different layouts for our website and while playing with them it messed up the current website. On Saturday the team decided on a new layout so I could fix the current one. I have almost finished the website. There are still a couple little things that still need to be added and fixed.
I also modified the blog layout and tried to tie it in better to the website.
Let me no if you see anything that should be added or fixed. Also if you have pictures or want different content in the website you can send them to me. Thank you.
-Cassandra

Howdy all,

I am about to go buy at least the aluminum for the chassis. With the kit of parts chassis and the u shape design we are doing, flexing is quite evident. I know the first year we used this base chassis we use square tube instead of c channel. I don't think the square tube was quite as flexible. I know that as we ad components we will increase stiffness, but we may have to add extra super structure to the elevator and hopper increase the stiffness. Do you think there is any advantage to going with sq. channel?

Elevator:

My thoughts yesterday on finalizing the design for the hopper and elevator is to make sure that we have correct geometry to suck in balls with the ground hog roller in front and move them back to the elevator in back.Pushing balls up into hopper will work easily without jamming. This was proven man robots in 2006. So tonight we need to establish the correct roller diameter and height from the floor, the correct angle of an in feed ramp to the back of the hopper, and the correct opening for the elevator to receive the balls and draw them up to the shooter. As far as belts for the elevator goes we can make that all work. There are plenty of good options. The hopper size and geometry may have to weight until we have everything else established.

Today Dean and I modeled the turret design on inventor. We mainly focused on the turn table for the turret so he can have Micron machine the parts for us.

-Daniel

Thanks for the blog, Dictator Mike. The other significant thing we did today was get the milling machine and the lathe cleaned up and operational. The new quick-change tooling on the mill is GREAT! Maybe tomorrow, or Monday I'll get the quick change toolpost on the lathe. I think we need to machine a part to get the quick change post on the cross-slide.

Today's clue: I want to be a quick-change artist!

The whole robot prototype almost came together today.
-The Chassis prototype has been fixed and resolved. It is now working well
-The hopper was made and put on the chassis. There are still conflicted interests of the final hopper.
-The elevator was mounted to the chassis, creating a good looking robot but still needs to be refined as the rest of the robot does also.
-The turret has come together though we've had some technical difficulties as we say. It does shoot relatively far and works like a charm. We still need to complete it as it cannot turn and it cannot go in a specific direction without a box aiming it.

Today we prototyped the hopper and attached it to the elevater we made the other day. We placed it all on the chassis. The system had some flaws, but overall it worked, and would be better with some refinement. Dead spots in the hopper are a big concern. Daniel will post pictures and videos. It was very fast at moving the balls around. I also made some optical enocoder mounts with the help of Josh but they are not quite finished. Tapping the holes isn't the easiest. Monday will be busy.

Well, I had a much longer post ready for here, but I guess it was so long that the page timed out and I lost it *sigh*. Well you will be spared then.

Key points.

Particle analysis is the way to go. Several filters factor in here. We need to work on which is best, location, bounding box, area, or all three for processing the tracked image. Clue for Dean's challenge, Particle Filtering, the way to filter the image so we only get the pixel groups we want to process.

Here are some links to follow up on.

http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5109425.html
http://www.ee.oulu.fi/mvg/page/tracking_and_motion
http://www.visionbib.com/bibliography/active690.html

below has a cost, but may give some ideas.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/v306052k277881u4/

The search criteria.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en& ... tnG=Search

Well, we will just have to talk about what we need to watch out for in the vision processing.

Goals for Sat. Finish robot running tracking process. Determine the way to determine range. Determine how we might adjust a shoot speed for distance (speed or angle, what is going to be best, or do we always shoot at a fixed range)

How about targets moving in the image?

See you in the morning!