Control System

Traction Control

In order to maximize our acceleration and pushing power, we created a traction control program. It uses encoders attatched to the drive train and attatched to free-spinning wheels. The speed read off the Drive wheel encoders is compared to the actual speed of the robot (read off the free-wheel encoders) and to the speed we are telling the robot to go. The program then creates an upper and lower limit for the power sent to the drive wheels in order to optimize the slip they have against the Regolith to give us the best traction.

Turret Auto-Targeting

To increase our accuracy in scoring moon rocks we created an auto-targeting program that uses the camera to center and follow the target. The system uses PID control to center the target in the camera image and tracks the changes in the position of the target with respect to our robot's chassis and calculates the distance to the trailer. Our robot will also be able to lead moving targets once the lead calculations have been debugged. The system converts all values from the camera and sensors into feet and degrees, even the camera pixels, to allow for easier to understand calculations and consistency throughout the program.

The Glasses

We added LEDs to a pair of safety glasses to create an easy to see Heads Up Display that allows the driver to know when to lock on and shoot without looking down. The LEDs are lit during teleop to tell the driver what the camera can see, red LEDs for a target in sight and green LEDs for a lock on a target. When the red LED lights up the driver knows that the camera can see a target and can use the lock on button to activate auto-tracking. The green LED signals a lock when auto-tracking and that a target is centered when shooting manually. When auto-targeting the camera also automatically adjusts the shooter wheel speed of the turret and can signal that the shooter is at the proper speed when this feature is enabled. This system allows for better control by the driver as it can be difficult to aim the turret when on the other side of the field or when another robot is blocking the drivers view.

Autonomous

Our autonomous program uses a table of distance and angle values that represent a path for the robot to follow. The robot uses traction control and a gyro to follow the path it is given. This method allows us to easlily create new autonomous modes by taking measurements and then running autonomous a few times to make sure the robot behaves correctly.