Firefighting Competition!

     Unfortunately, after several attempts I was unable to upload a video of our robot in action at the competition this past weekend so here is a picture of the robot at the competition (not very exciting I know). However, a video of the robot finding and extinguishing a flame will be shown in our final presentation. Johnny5 performed very well during the first run as he extinguished the flame in the second room he explored. In fact, the robot ran better than ever, and our hopes were high. The second run did not go so well...I initially thought it was a power issue, but I now think it must have been because of the unreliability of the encoders.

Tying It All Together

     This is a picture of the last real exercise we were to complete before beginning to test the robot on the field. It actually consisted of two parts. The first part was to simply to have to robot drive forward until the line sensor detected the line of tape and have it scan for the flame. The second was to have the robot detect the flame and then drive toward it and stop about 6 inches from the flame using the ultrasonic sensors.

     This is a Gantt chart showing all the tasks that needed to be completed before the robot was ready to compete in the actual competition. There are some mechanical things that needed to be done, but the majority of the time was actually spent testing, fine tuning the code, and more testing.

     This is a picture of our robot that I took the morning of the competition. It is complete with everything it needed to navigate all four rooms of the maze, find the flame and extinguish it including a line sensor, flame sensor, ultrasonic sensors, encoders, and a CPU fan. One cannot see from the picture, but there is also a voltage regulator running from the battery to the VEXduino.