Open Collections

Miller, Tristan; Saxena, Pranav; Yee, Rosanna

The purpose of this project is to design and develop a low-cost, portable, and autonomous sand painting robot. The robot uses 6 different colours in its sand painting and covers an area up to 6m x 6m fully with 1cm x 1cm sand pixels. It can be assumed that the surface the robot works on is dry, even, and level, and that there is no wind present. A simple computer interface to the robot is provided which allows the user to input the physical dimensions of the room the robot is allotted, the image the robot is to paint, and other information to direct the robot. The robot operates in an x-y plane in a printer-like fashion, with stepper motors driving omni-wheels. The sand deposition system is gravity-fed, with servo motors controlling the sand flow out of 6 sand canisters. Two laser distance meters are used to track the position and alignment of the robot. The system would consist of wireless communication via Xbee between the robot and a laptop. The laptop serves as a control centre for directing the robot’s movement, sand dispensing, refilling, etc. After testing, the robot has met requirements for consistency of amount of sand delivered in sand shots, movement precision between pixels, and the time required for the robot to distribute sand per pixel. However, at the current stage of development, not all components of the robot are fully finished. Sand level measurement using IR sensors have not been implemented and the integration of position tracking via laser distance meter in the operation of the robot has yet to be completed. While the GeckoDrive boards currently used to control the stepper motors are functional, due to their expense, an alternative driver board, A4983 Pololu stepper motor driver carrier, would later replace the GeckoDrive board instead. The team is committed to further work past the January, with the goal of completing all required aspects of the robot by March 8, 2012.

Text

University of British Columbia. APSC 479

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0074480

Science, Faculty of; Physics and Astronomy, Department of

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/