On our way to autonomy, one of the things we need to have is the ability for the robot to centre itself left and right in the course as it moves forward. First, I’ll explain what a PID controller is and how we will use it on our robot. PID stands for Proportional-Integral-Derivative controller. It’s...Read More
The S.A.R.T. performed a drop test! We were pretty sure our robot would survive, but we’d never done a proper test before. We figured, now that we have our robot together again, why not give it a shot? Watch the video… in glorious 4K Overall, it was a success. The robot survived. The board and...Read More
Here at S.A.R.T., we are immeasurably proud to anounce our robot is, at long last, semi-autonomous. You can watch the robot in action and in glorious 4K below: Obviously this is extremely basic (literally all the logic in about five lines of code), but it’s the most autonomous our robot’s ever been (except the...Read More
As I talked about in a previous post, half of our servos weren’t working. Of course, I was going to try to fix them before we spend anymore money on new ones, so that’s what I did today. Some of them were broken for certain, they either didn’t show up at all when connected or...Read More
One of our other major issues in Canada were the USB ports. Due to the small size of our robot, we needed to have right angle USB port extensions. These would plug into the robot and allow us to plug in the USB2AX device and cameras. The USB thing we had used. So we needed...Read More
A lot of things went wrong in Canada, sure.But perhaps the worse of our issues were the servos. The other day, we were planning on running a short demo during the regional RoboCup competition. We all got to school on Saturday and began putting it back together again. However, we didn’t have four functioning Dynamixel...Read More
The competition was over. Well, truthfully, we were a bit bummed out about it. We knew we had a good robot and if it had worked properly, we think would have done really well. We had not made the finals, and the disappointment was evident in the team. We had a well deserved late morning,...Read More
Today was our first day of competition. Everything we had worked on for the past six to nine months was leading up to today. We got up early and went down for breakfast, enjoying the local delicacy of pancakes and bacon smothered in maple syrup. We left breakfast with full stomachs and ready minds, keen...Read More
We spent today working on rewiring and testing sensors. We made improvements to the scripts on the robot too. Kyle worked on the motion tracking, he had some luck, we now had a pretty cool but basic tracking script. I ended up doing a little work on the frontend. This year, we opted for a...Read More
Our first day out of school and our first day of travel to Canada. Our trip started at the Canberra airport at 4:45am where all our team and the other robotics team met up for our 6:10am flight to Melbourne. During this short flight we mainly just settled in and caught up on sleep that...Read More
