Group 1

Mechatronics

Spring 2014

David Buslawski

Yuming Ding

Justin Licke

Siddhant Morakhia

The main goal of our final project was to design an autonomous robot to navigate through an obstacle course. The robot needs to reach five different points of interest throughout the course scattered in a star-like pattern, avoid obstacles that are along the way, and map out the 12x12 foot course. Additionally, the robot needs to use vision processing to locate and map blue and orange golf balls, collect the golf balls using a gripper apparatus, and drop the golf balls at specific locations depending on the color.

Our strategy for maneuvering through the course was to implement Bug 1 and draw a vector from our robot’s X and Y coordinates to the coordinates of the desired point. This vector remained constant to set a path for the robot to follow. Using the LADAR angles we compensated for the obstacles in the path of the robot by sending it into our wall following code. At that instant, the robot created new vectors that constantly updated as its position changed. The goal of this was break off from wall following when the angle between our initial vector and the robot’s vector was really small.

Project Code