Hello! It’s Barney again. I am here to give a few updates regarding S.A.R.T’s progress, considering we haven’t had an update for cough two months cough. We decided to remove the Xirrus XR-600 from the control unit and we are going to replace it with the Unifi AP AC PRO because the Xirrus access point...Read More

Authors: Connor Kneebone, Matthew Williams, Jack Williams, Alexander Cavalli, Aaron Maggs, Ryan Ewyk, Riley Cockerill, Michael Cavalli, Charlotte Drury, Graham Stock, Ryan Millard-Cartwright Published: 17th of March, 2019 Abstract The Semi-Autonomous Rescue Team (herein known as the S.A.R.T.) is a group of STEM enthusiasts formed in late 2015 with the intent of developing and creating...Read More

At the end of 2018 we were gifted a TurtleBot3 Burger by our new sponsor, Tribotix. A TurtleBot is a low cost robot that we built over a day during the holiday workshop. The TurtleBot has a Raspberry Pi 3 (Model B) and a 360° LiDAR, 3-Axis gyroscope, 3-Axis accelerometer and 3-Axis magnetometer sensors, OpenCR...Read More

Say hello to SFX’s new SART team! This year’s team consists of three year 11’s, Barney Bruckner, Martin Hosking, Anthony Gambale and two year 12’s, Michael Cavalli, and myself, Charlotte Drury. Barney’s role is in Autonomy. Barney’s been charging ahead with basic self-navigation and looking into ROS (Robot Operating System) as an option. Please refer...Read More

Hello! I am Barney, I’ll be taking over autonomy for the next two years for S.A.R.T. This post isn’t actually about the progress of autonomy, but rather my plans for it. The main goal for the Mk 4, is to be able to follow the left wall throughout the course. Though this will be inefficient...Read More

An issue we’ve commonly faced while operating our robot is that the servos will keep spinning if the script crashes or if we exit the script via CTRL+C. I’ve always had the stop_servos.py script for this exact purpose but it has to be executed manually after exiting the main script, i.e. python3 stop_servos.py. This script...Read More

Now that we have a rather nice PID controller, it’s time to test it! Enjoy responsibly Using just a PID controller alone, we can implement rudimentary autonomy. It’s only basic, but it’s a start and it’s the first time our robot has ever completed a course unaided. Another video, showcasing it from a different angle...Read More

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

In light of the recent drop test debacle, we’ve decided on a new infill pattern for the wheel hub. The infill that we used for the drop test was a small square pattern that stays unchanged throughout the print. Evidently, this wasn’t strong enough to handle the stress of the weight of the robot and...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