Engineering Projects/Robot car/Howard Community College/Fall2012/P1-501 JHK

Electronic Sections Expected

Problem Statement

Program a autonomous robot car that is functional and creative that can respond to specific equation in our programing. Modify the robot car to move and react to any command given.

Team Members

Joseph Jenkins

Kyle McDaniel

Halima Khatun

Summary

Our first idea was to create an autonomous car with a mindstorm car. Our idea was good except we had more obstacles to work with than our second idea. Our second idea was to take apart a r.c. car and configure with the arduino to move. We took apart both the remote and the base of the robot car and configured it with the arduino. The arduino is wired into the remote control and we can control the car with the arduino to do whichever command we give it.

Story

At the beginning of our design process the team sat down and decided which project would be best, our ideas were built upon what project would have a minimal amount of work but yet was a challenge and we could build without any problems. Our decision had to be on the first day of our week 0 so we decide to do the robot car, the team was interested in the idea of how the robot car worked and how to program the car. Our teams goal at first was to re-create and innovate a mindstorm car. The programed box came with the car and we could program it to our specific needs,while taking apart the car to adjust to our needs of fitting through a maze or path way.

Picture of NXT Mindstorm taken by Kyle McDaniel.

We came upon a problem with the mindstorm car. The mindstorm programming box was not working properly, it could not download on the schools computers and there was nothing on the display. The time to download the program and fix the box would cut down our time to re-create the mindstorm. After new batteries were placed in the box the program was able to work, but displayed nothing on the screen, therefore making it incompatible. After a long discussion in the group we decided to start over. The idea of using a mindstorm car was changed to re-construct an already built R.C. car. It would be interesting to take it apart and see why and how it worked. Following the end of Week 1 and start of Week 2 we started taking apart the plastic covering off of our yellow hummer R.C. car(refer to yellow hummer car on the side). The plastic covering prevented us from placing the arduino on the car and could link up with the circuitry in the car. It took over one hour to get the yellow top off the chassy because they were held together by 4 very long screws.

Programing the arduino was the hardest challenge because no one in our group was familiar enough with it to know where to start with the programing. Because of the time constraint on this project we decided as a group to ditch the idea of making an obstacle course for the robot car to travel through. We want the car to move autonomously and to work without any major problems. After this we will hopefully be able to construct a different base for the appearance of the car to make it more attractive rather than just seeing it's underbelly with the ardunio and circuitry.

After presenting our progress in week 3, our classmates and our professor told us that it would be easier to program the arduino to control the remote control instead of the whole R.C. car. After seeing what the inside of the R.C. car looked like, we agreed with them because there is a lot more circuits and wires inside than there are in the remote control. We removed the top half of the remote control along with the joysticks in order to get to the inside of the remote control. After learning more about how the remote control works, we discovered that the remote control uses metal clasps to send electrical signals through the antennae to make the R.C. car move. Because of the time constraint, it was getting difficult to be able to get the R.C. car to move forward and backward and turn while accomplishing these tasks, therefore we decided that the next group that works on this project could try to accomplish this. Now that it is week 4 and we still need to finish programming the R.C. car to move forward and backward, we are coming to a close on our first project and all of this went by really fast, but at least we have a end result.

video of moving car

Decision List

Material List

Toy R.C. Car
Arduino
about six medium size wires
remote control of R.C car
Arduino program
electrical tape/soldering machine
Two 9-Volt batteries

If this project where to be continued(if the next team used a car provided in class) they would need only a working arduino and batteries to power the car.

Software List

example program our team used-

                               The software we used was Arduino 1.0.

Time

64 hours total

16 hours per person for each week

Tutorials

Autonomous remote control-video-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRwth-XAaeA

360 control-example-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHLnw9Yt1rk

Next Steps

The next steps would be to continue researching what kind of programming we can use in order to make the robot car turn in addition to moving foward and backward. It might also be possible to explore the idea of hooking the arudino to the actual car instead of the remote control. The remote control might not be useful to future groups that work on this project. While trying to soder the wires from the arduino to the remote control, it might have damaged the material making the remote control not as easily accessible.