Engineering Projects/Robot car/Howard Community College/Fall2012/p2-503-SMJVS

Problem Statement
Try to Get a robot car to run independently of human input.

Team Members
Cale Broemmelsiek Ziegler Onzere Smith

Summary
Over the course of the project, our group focused on individual elements of getting an RC car to run with an Arduino board. The steering and motor stepper functions proved challenging, but we did make considerable progress towards smoother turns and acceleration. The line detection sensor works and can be implemented into a line following program. However, this program requires three sensors as opposed to just two. Also, we explored obstacle detection with an IR sensor and had some success at outputting distinct values from this. Overall, we concentrated on different pieces of the robot car so that the next group can put them together.

Story
10/16/12 - We split up the different components of the robotic controls and assigned each member of the team to concentrate on specific tasks.

1. Variable Steering - Joshuah Ziegler

2. Variable Speed - Victor Onzere

3. Collision Detection - Steven Cale

4. Course Detection - Marc Broemmelsiek

5. Remote Control - Stephanie A. Smith

10/25/12

We obtained a stepper motor for variable steering and began attaching it to an Arduino unit. Also, we smoothed out problems connecting and interfacing the Arduino with a computer. We explored and are working with infrared sensors to be able to map out lines or obstacles.

11/1/12

We got a Infrared sensor to start detecting as line with electrical tape and computer paper. Also, we have gotten the steering motor to communicate with the arduino software and are progressing by adding values to the program. The motor control is proving challenging to connect input values into the arduino software.

11/8/12

The line detector will detect a white line on a black surface, so we concentrated on expanding this to include the other functions. These include the stepper and steering functions and we found a program that will relate the sensors to the steering and power, so that it will follow a line. We also implemented a circuit that uses an LED to sense how far away a wall or obstacle is from the car. Then, we took the sensors from the Wow Wee bot and discovered that they successfully sensed a voltage change in the LED's.

Decision List
List all formal decisions made with links to their documentation such as a decision tree or decision matrix.

Material List
1. Arduino boards

2. Infrared Sensors

3. RC cars

4. Stepper Motor

5. 3 Breadboards

6. Spare wiring parts

Software List
1. Arduino Software

2. Line Follower

3. Line Detector

Time
32 hours 12 minutes

Tutorials
''All projects create new tutorials of technical details future participants are going to want to know. They are going to be separate pages that are linked to here.''

Next Steps
These Next Steps are what we believe to be good starting points to advance this project further.

1. After becoming comfortable with the Arduino software, the stepper functions for the motor and steering were the biggest obstacles that our group faced. Once these our dealt with, the car can move smoothly over either a line or a designated course.

2. The line detection has been pretty successful, so expanding from line detection to obstacle detection would be a good next step.

3. Although the line detection works, the line follower needs to be explored so that the sensors can essentially drive a car across a white or black line using the QRE1113 sensors.