We had a real successful night of programming tonight. I think we stunned a few of the adult mentors and really excited some of the students that hadn't really seen what we have been working on for the past 5 weeks.
We had the robot on a slippery tiled floor and spent a good part of our time tweaking our traction control code. We wrote some simple code that was intended to "ramp-up" the speed of the drive motors in the event the driver mashed the stick all the way forward or backwards. In past tests if the driver did this, the wheels would spin and it took the robot a lot of time to get moving.
After our tweaking, the code was running great. We even did some tests to try to make the robot lose traction. 2 students and 2 mentors, all sitting in chairs with wheels on them, arranged themselves in front of the robot, such that when the robot started to move they would all get pushed forward. Our robot was able to start off, never slipping a wheel, and pushed all 4 people and chairs across the room. Score 1 for the programming team.
For our next trick we tried our camera code in one of our autonomous modes. We modified the code so that the robot, once it found the target, would drive towards and follow the target. I think this one left a few of the adults speechless. We enabled the robot in autonomous mode and the servos fired and centered the camera. It began panning, back and forth, then as soon as it spotted the target, it began driving towards the target and as the target moved the robot adjusted accordingly and kept following it. This was very cool; score another for the programming team!
We've come a long way in a short amount of time, but we cannot get over confident. We still have a lot of loose ends to tie up. Our deadline is approaching and we need to keep our noses to the grindstone.
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