How are you going to operate you're robot?

[Danny Diaz]

Team 418 has a control system for driving the robot pretty much exactly like everyone else, 2 CH FlightSticks. However, for our Operator, we have a pretty ingenious control arm - seems like teams 1100 and 1138 also thought of the same thing. It removes the need for "presets" because the actual position of our arm is the preset - the pots on the control arm are calibrated to the pots on the robot via software, so when we move our control arm to a specific position we in effect move our robot arm to that exact same position. Most of the buttons on the control board are just pass-throughs to the buttons on the joystick, so the operator can use the buttons on the control stick or on the control board and they do the same thing. 2 of the buttons are pass-throughs on the "unused" joystick port; we only use that port when we're diagnosing code.



The only things we don't show are the Laptop with our really sweet LabVIEW-based Ultra-Dashboard and our light bar that's attached to an NI USB-6009 DAQ device. We have a relatively poor quality video of our unfinished (prototype) dashboard showing our robot arm and what we were able to do with the LabVIEW Dashboard and the LabVIEW Picture Controls - watch the robot arm in the video as it moves with the real robot arm. You've got to look closely at the screen, the drawn robot arm doesn't come through as well as its joints. Pretty Sweet, can't wait until Lone Star.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...77271172543924

-Danny