4-23-2012

Today class was devoted to working on our project #2.  I finally came up with an idea for the project.  I'm going to have the robot follow a line, while having a sensor on the side that will look for "garbage cans."  When the robot finds one it will stop and an arm will extend and grab the can, lift it up and dump it into a bin, then put the can back on the ground and continue down the path.  The real world application for this would to have the robot follow a curb or sidewalk, looking for trash cans.  Dr. B gave me a pre-constructed arm to use to grab the cans.  I mounted the arm today as well as attached the line follower sensors and IR sensor to find the cans.  I will need a separate battery to run the arm because it will draw too much current from the board.  I still need to wire everything into the board as well.   Hopefully I can do that next class period, then begin to program it.  I also cleaned up the wiring involved with the Banebot, switch and battery.

Cleaned up my previous wiring

Mounted arm, line follower and IR sensor

IR sensor

Arm

Arm