Team: Autonomous Robot: Lefty Team Members Daniel Crews Paul Stevenson EGN:1935 ECE Adventures Team: Autonomous Robot: Lefty Team Members Daniel Crews Paul Stevenson

Presentation Outline Member bios Design methodology Problems and solutions Team conclusions

Bio of Daniel Crews 1st semester Sophomore Electrical Engineering major Considering minor in Business. This course has helped me decide that automated systems are fun to work with. But quasi-real programming is…. awkward. My goals at the University of Florida are to make it out alive, preferably with a degree that will take me to success.

Bio of Paul Stevenson 1st semester Freshman Chemical Engineering major on Pre-med track I’d really like to get involved in Biomedical Engineering but it isn’t offered as an undergraduate major yet… This course has helped me realize what a degree in Electrical Engineering allows you to do I have also learned a lot about engineering in general My goals at the university of Florida are to get an undergraduate degree and get accepted to the UF medical school

Bio of Paul Stevenson (Cont.) My goals at the university of Florida are to get an undergraduate degree and get accepted to the UF medical school I also plan on getting a lot more involved in projects around campus I hope to become a doctor with a specialization in some aspect of the field of medicine Try and get as well-rounded of an education as possible.

Video

Design Methodology Problem: navigate maze Considered maze and determined what method (right wall following or left wall following…etc.) Ultimately created a program that would use both walls to navigate the maze To do this we used all of our infrared ports Calibrating each one by trial and error We used the sensors to avoid bumping into walls as well as follow them

Design Methodology (Cont.) We measured the average CDS cell reading on black and white paper to define a workable parameter for the code (so the robot would treat the black area as another wall Initially our algorithm was designed to stop when a black area was detected, obviously when the scenario was altered, we had to rework that behavior

Problems and solutions Robot had severe leftwards drift due to unbalanced servos - Required special consideration in code to compensate. Dying batteries -Required dealing with requisitions process with TA. Excessive competition for on-track testing time -Largely required making do with minimal testing, the crossing of fingers, and using the emergent behavior of the robot to provide error recovery. Unprepared lab -System setup, competitors had last lab’s working code to start with (we did not)…

Team Conclusions Its easy to program if you don’t have to program… This simple application demonstrates the massive potential for automated machines Working with real code is much easier than the lab’s “code”