Finally I have accomplished the planed transforms on the robots, and initialized them in good working conditions as the project experiment required, open architecture, wireless communication capable, encoder feedback and heterogeneous. Now, you can see them all in the picture showing blow.
The three boxes are also made ready for the project experiment, and at this moment they are all in black as shown.
After a few days of analysis, I decide to make a few changes on the Bigfoot-Bot (I named it). Due to all wheels are connected to motor by rigid shafts, the kinematics for the robot to turn around will be different from Boe-bot. The way it can turn around is by wasting large amount energy on sliding wheels, where control of the robot in many aspects will be difficult. Hence I decide to modify the robot base and change the electronics, so that it can be better fit into my project.
Lots of works needed to make the changes…
I layout the following graphs to make everything in plan and allow myself to have more directed view on it. (Some friends asked me what is the software that I usually do the layouts, it is Microsoft Visio.)
List of the changes
The wireless communication link has been established, which means PC can remotely control the robot and transfer data with the robot. There are some tricky parts during the process, which made the process become more challenging.
Example like, the newly released Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5 CTP does not work well with BoeBot, I was trying figure out the problem in every parts that involved in the communication link other then the Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5 but the whole comm. system did not turn out right, in the end with the help from a friend who is familiar with Labview testing, we conclude the problem must due to the software part. When I reversed to the Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.0, the whole system worked fine.
A new robot has joined my robot team. This robot has been used by other people previously for another project. This robot looks like to have a robust base but an old weak "heart" and only one wheel attached with encoder. I think there should be a lot of works to do to make it suitable for the tasks in my project.
