User:Wikipolice/project3individual

Project Preference
Mobile Robot Hallway Navigation, Autonomous Power Wheel, Wind Turbine

Problem Statement
I am working on the Mobile Robot Hallway navigation project and the main objective of this project is to reduce the time needed to navigate the hallway. This is the Implement phase of the CDIO process.

Project Plan
In the next 4 weeks we plan to do several tests with the robot and change the variables and motor speeds to try to reduce the time the robot takes to navigate the hallway.
 * Reduce the number of sharp turns
 * Reduce the number of unnecessary turns
 * Reduce the time needed to circuit the hallway
 * Adjust sensor distances to try to keep the robot from zig zagging constantly, and travel in a relatively straight path

Week 1 Narrative
This week due to me being out of town, not a whole lot got accomplished in our group. We were able to develop the goals for this project and I spent some time thinking of different ways to try and reduce the time the robot needs to travel through the hallway. My ideas:
 * Make the sensors detect objects that are farther away so that it can compensate for the obstacle earlier
 * Make the motors not turn so sharply so that the robot travels in a relatively straight path until it reaches the corner
 * Set the sensors to keep the robot in the center of the hallway, but when the left sensor sees further than "x" cm (the corners in the hallway) it should turn left.

Week 2 Narrative
This week Lucas and I realized that someone had taken our robot that we needed for our project, so we spend most of the beginning of the week trying to locate it. When we were unable to locate the robot we asked Professor Edelen if he knew where it was and he did not. We then went to ask Professor Foerster if he knew where the robot was and he also did not know where it was located. So, due to our project going missing, Lucas and I decided to reconstruct the Lego robot from scratch. Once finished, I decided to start working on the code. I quickly realized that I did not have a saved version of the Simulink model that I needed to run the code, so I had to backtrack to what I did last project term and recreate the simulink model that I once had.

This coming week I hope to have the Simulink model fully operational and have the robot operating on the Matlab code again. Once it is operation we can begin to tweak the sensor distances and motor speeds to make it navigate the hallway and a faster pace.

Week 3 Narrative
This week Lucas and I decided to initially try adding a third sensor to the robot to see if we could increase the length of time the robot took in between hitting the walls by increasing the motor speed on the left side by 1 cycle, and we would have the right sensor sense when it gets too close to the wall on the right and counteract by turning left. After several attempts with that code we decided to go back to just 2 sensors because the commands that were set up with the right sensor did not want to cooperate with the left and front sensor that we were more reliant on.

After going back to just 2 sensors we decided to mess around with the left motor speed to control how quickly the robot corners left when it is following the left side wall of the CL building hallway. Our goal was to have the robot travel along the most elongated path that it could between coming within sensing distance of the left wall, while avoiding the right wall. In theory this would make the robots elapsed time around the hallway much faster, because it will not waste nearly as much time turning sharply right whenever it sees the left wall, because it will sense the left wall fewer times. For the most part this change worked, but our problems started appearing when the front sensor started sensing the right wall in front of it when the robot turned right and then began its left travel movement towards the left wall. It would sense the right wall and then turn sharply right and end up going in the reverse direction that it originally was coming from.

We then decided to start changing some of the sensor distances to be farther away and closer to try to eliminate time that was being wasted by sensing objects and walls too early or too late.

On Thursday Lucas and I met up to work on the program some more and continued to change the ultrasonic sensor distances and we then changed the batteries in the robot to try to make it drive faster throughout the hallway. The new batteries decreased the time that the robot needed to navigate the CL building hallway. I then made video of the robot navigating the CL hallway with my camera that I brought in from home so that Lucas and I could present our robot at the Projects Week Presentation in the Galleria. During the presentation Lucas spoke and explained how the robot operates and I operated the powerpoint and showed the video that I put together of the robot navigating the hallway, and skipped around showing different parts of the hallway that it navigated including around people and around benches, corners, and trash cans.

Week 4 Narrative
''Describe in detail what you did for your team during the week (and weekend). Compare your task (from CDIO discuss page) with what you actually did.''