Benjamin Chen Suhail Gul Wai-Sze Lok Rob Merkle Brian Shaw Renee Soenen

Objective: To build an autonomous firefighting robot

Structural Design Considerations Small or 0° turn radius Given size restriction and ground clearance Friction Type of drive-train Weight and center of gravity location

Wheels First considered to determine range of chassis size to work with Quantity and type which help with finalizing drive- train Explored track style, multi-directional and standard hobbyist rubber wheels Size to provide enough ground clearance

Chassis and Drive-train Shapes and sizes Square, triangular and rectangular Material Lightweight and easy to machine Deck quantity Quantity, speed and torque of motors Steering mechanism

Chassis and Drive-train Current Design Chose optimal shape for best wheel configuration for design Aluminum chassis Two decks Four modified servos to drive

Possible Structural Issues Amount of stress on shaft of servos Possibly perform FEA to determine max stress Clearance with face of wheels Change wheels (last resort) Vibration Change thickness or material of chassis for more flexibility Shock absorption on wheel (last resort)

Rendered output of robot

DC Motor vs Modified Servo DC Motor: Energy efficient Powerful Modified Servo: Excellent control of speed Sufficient torque and speed in a compact unit Internally geared

Parameter on picking servo Weight of the robot Desired terrain Desired velocity and acceleration Voltage Power consumption controllability

Fire Extinguishing Mechanism Didn’t want to use air Several different ideas CO 2 System similar to a paintball gun Paintball gun worked, but not feasible Foam Spray Small travel shaving cream can Only shot a stream about 3 in.

Fire Extinguishing Mechanism Spray Bottle Febreeze bottle, other press down bottle Pump-spray system (current) Windshield washer nozzles

Fire Extinguishing Mechanism Future work Testing for volumetric flow rate and operating pressure Buying misting nozzles Testing Range, operation time, etc.

Constraints for electronic platform Size Power requirement Processing ability I/O options Programmability

Possible platform options Motorola HCS12 based EVBplus MiniDragon+ or MiniDragon-Plus2 microcontroller Xilinx Spartan3 based development board Texas Instruments OMAP based Gumstix Overo or Marvell PXA270 based Gumstix Verdex Pro ADI Blackfin based microcontroller Intel Atom based D945GCLF development board

Working on basic design requirements. Custom building parts required for the base. Working on basic design. Connecting the sensors and servos. Working on circuits and power requirement.

PROGRAMMING Working on programming servos Working on programming microcontroller for connecting sensors. Working on pathfinding algorithms

First ideas for navigation: Strictly sensor-based travel. Specific behavior algorithms, such as straight-line and always-left-turn kind of algorithms. Knowledge of the house layout via a stored map.

Navigation The robots primary method of understanding the environment will be vision via a camera. The camera-based vision system is complemented by an array of sensors for redundancy and verification purposes. Implementing a vision-based system is more technically challenging than the previous ideas, but the benefits of vision are many.

Original project timeline A tad too optimistic…

Any Questions? We won’t tell you too many details of our proprietary implementation…