View Single Post
  #36   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 03-04-2007, 23:11
jmcr8on jmcr8on is offline
Registered User
AKA: Jim Creighton
FRC #1189 (Gearheads)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Rookie Year: 2006
Location: Grosse Pointe Park
Posts: 16
jmcr8on is on a distinguished road
Re: 1189 - Human-Bot Arm Control

Quote:
Originally Posted by vivek16 View Post
by the way, how did you guys decide to do this control system?
im sure some other teams with an arm thought of something like this but was there a person who researched and/or drew up designs to show the team that this was do-able?
Well....here's the story:
We had two joy sticks and found it was not very intuitive to control the arm segments, wrist joint, wrist rotation and turret rotation. The team did not have a lot of time to practice.....

At BMR Team 1138 (Eagle Engineering) was in the pit next to us. Their robot did not show up until 4:00 PM on Thursday (it was lost, not shipped, wrong truck, etc.). Their robot (when it did arrive) had a similar (without the turret) arm segments as our bot....and they used a joy stick. But...they showed us this OI with a small segmented wooden arm and pots on plexiglass that was manipulated by their fingers....that they had not yet been able to get to work successfully. On Saturday afternoon they got it to work.....and it was cool.

On the 5.5 hours drive back to Grosse Pointe from BMR I worked out a physical prototype in my head....knowing that most of the arm code was already in place from the PID control and the functions that the programmer had already written (good ol' modular code). During a fix it window we built a simple wooden prototype, attached pots and lots of loose wires back to the OI game port...and duct taped it to my son's (the programmer) arm.

The prototyped proved to be feasible.

In the next fix it window the build team constructed the arm, the wiring was done (good ol' LAN cables and modular connectors)....and it was tested....the pots tweaked...and tested...and tweaked...and tested...and finally passed the tests to be called 'good'.

So..we gained inspiration from Team 1138's concept and took it to the next level.

btw....a thank you email was sent to Team 1138 for their sharing and inspiration. And now... a public note of thanks: Thank You, Team 1138.
__________________
Team 1189 - Gearheads