Alex Sojda (EE), Chris Kaczmarek (SE), Alan Meekins (CS), Josh Watts (CS), Jason Stanislawski (CE)
The RIT Robotics Club will be competing in the Firefighting Contest at Penn State Abington. We are also competing in the Mini-Grand Challenge, see our project page.
We are using a Gumstix + Robostix combination. To detect the candle, our robot is using a CMUcam2+. In order to avoid obstacles, our robot has a sonar sensor attached to a servo (giving us 180 degree obstacle avoidance). For odometry, we will be using an optical PS/2 mouse. This will be our first year competing in firefighting contests, we plan on working yearly on this and the Trinity College Firefighting Contest.
Mechanical - Our mechanical design is centered around two continious-rotiation servo motors. They are attached to a piece of plywood, with a caster in the rear.
Electrical - The robostix is used to control the two continious-rotation servos, and the servo controling the sonar/cmucam. It is also the interface to the PS/2 mouse. If there is time, there will be battery monditoring built-in with the onboard ADC. The robostix communicates with the gumstix over a i2c connection. On that i2c bus there is also the i2c sonar. The cmu cam is attached to the uart on the gumstix. The gumstix is used as the "master unit", it has a compact flash wireless card on it, giving us a wireless debug terminal.
We haven't competed yet. Results will be here when we do.
For the source to this please email me: [alexs _at_ mdrc.rit.edu]. I'm always more then happy to share code with other people, but I would like to know more about what other people are doing [ I also don't like people using my code to pass their classes!].
If you are intrested in sponsoring the RIT Robotics Club, email Alex and Josh.
