Team Progress

View our Progress Report here!

4.19.07
We measured voltages again today because of a tip that we got saying that there should be 24V going to each of the servomotors. There is a circuit between the motors and the power supply. We have not yet identified what the circuit does just yet but we have measured 24V on one side of the circuit, and 10V on the other side. We think that this circuit may be the underlying cause of the wheels "locking up".
4.13.07
The server/middleware solution is now integrated with the GUI. We can now send commands from the GUI to the middleware and have that communicate with the robot through our network.
4.12.07
We are getting close to Design Day and the problem of the motors stopping is becoming a real issue again. After some testing we found that the wheels "lock up" after the robot is run for some time. There is -10V across the motors for a forward movement. and +10V for a backward movement. There is 0V across the motors when NASABot is still.

4.05.07
We have created a 3D model of the courtyard that we wish to test against our NASABot generated map for accuracy. The test model was created with Autodesk Maya. This is a very powerful program generally used the entertainment industry for videogame and movie graphics. TV shows like Futurama and Veggie Tales were also incorporate some of Maya's magic.

3.22.07
We have implemented a Virtual Robot LADAR Emulator for testing purposes. It works with the Virtual Robot and communicates with the rest of the Virtual system as the acutal ladar would.
3.21.07
The GUI's Construction is complete. It is able to display the 3D point clouds and the user is able to manipulate the point cloud to view it from a top-down view. This is the default view but our GUI is not limited to just this view. The points don't give every detail about the image from a top-down view so the user is able to rotate and shift the point cloud to catch a better glimpse of the image.
3.2.07
We have built a "Virtual Robot" for simulation of our code. The "Virtual Robot" is code that would return the values that we would send to NASABot after issuing a command from the GUI.
2.23.07
We have design a layout for the GUI. We thought that it would be important to include controls such as: rotate left and right, take ladar image, go and more. The robot should move by clicking an area on the map. The GUI will draw a straight line for the robot to traverse.
2.19.07
After reviewing the Beacon System we concluded that the Iterative Closest Point(ICP) algorithm would be just as good in enabling the robot locate itself within the area to be mapped. ICP will iteratively traslate and rotate points a subsequent picture to match the correct points in the previous picture(s) to essentially mosaic the them together into one picture.
2.16.07
The image from the ladar is a depth map that is not visually friendly for the Graphical User Interface (GUI). We have taken the ladar image and converted it from a depth map to a map of points in 3D space. We call it a 3D point cloud.