Part 1 | Picnic Day | National Semiconductor
It's a class that is like a senior design
project all year long. Our goal is build a autonomous car that will run on a
track (a one-inch wide vinyl tape on the floor). Basically whichever team's car
runs the fastest will win the competition on picnic day. Doug, my partner in the
project, and I have been working on this car for two quarters now. We named it
"Trogdor -- the Burninator"
PART I -- Motor Feedback Control Loop
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Basically the point of the feedback control loop is to ensure that the car still runs at the same speed even if the battery is dying. |
As you can see, there's a little disk encoder that spins with the axel, the thing on both sides of the disk is the photoreceptor that basically will tell me how fast my car is going. |
Part II -- Optical
Sensors for the Servo
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Doug and I decided to use optical sensors to sense the track. Photo-transistors are the means the achieve this goal. Basically what happens is that because the vinyl tape reflects better than the carpet, the optical sensors will turn on when they're on top of the tape. Then we use the information to tell the micro-processor to decide which way to turn.
Work in Progress 03/23/2004
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As you can see, there are more sensors added and the bar that holds the sensors have been replaced by cardboard instead of plexyglass. ('cause it's just simply a pain in the butt to cut the plexyglass.) |
The switch is also being secured onto the board and is better installed onto the whole system. 'cause the connection to the switch used to fail constantly. |
The sensors work!!!! |
