Wheels in Motion

Tonight was our deadline for having the robot ready to drive, and I'm proud to say that we are right on track. At just about 8pm tonight we put our competition robot for this year on the floor and gently pushed the joysticks and she responded brilliantly. Actually she moved in reverse when we pushed the joysticks forward, but that was fixed with a quick tweak of the software and a download.

Tonight wasn't quite as simple as I made it sound, prior to our rounds of cheering, we downloaded code to the controller board and took it to the shop where our build team is building the robot. The build team took some time mounting the control board on a pair of hinges and when they were done we took the robot to a classroom (with a slippery tile floor) and blocked it up on a table to run some initial tests. Our tests discovered a minor problem (we missed connecting one of the Jaguar speed controllers). Once this was fixed we saw no other issues. It was time to hit the floor.

Our first drive was slow, steady and very controlled. By the end of the session we were pushing it a little to realize our traction capabilities. Our robot has a lot of wheels on the ground. I'm not letting on as to how many right now, probably later. I thought our robot handled quite well considering the environment. About half way through, we hooked up our trailer to the robot so we could see how it would perform pulling a load of "moon rocks". Again, I thought it performed quite well.

I have some pictures, and video that I may post a little later. It's a little early in the season for me to feel comfortable posting too much information. I decided to check the date at which we were driving last season, and we are almost 2 weeks ahead of where we were a year ago.

Milestone "Wheels in Motion" - complete.