As Eurobot season kicks off once again, we’re excited to share the first update on our progress this year!
First of all, we want to share our plans this year with you: We plan on using a similar hardware design like last years, but plan on switching to a Teensy 4.1 from our Raspberry Pi, since we had connection issues in France because of the many WiFi networks there. We switched to a LAN cable, but this was far from perfect to use. We thought about many ideas to get around this problem, like using a 5 GHz network for our raspberry pi, but since we also had issues with our power supply that would kill the Raspberry Pi completely, and the need of starting the bot via the computer, we wanted something simpler to use.
We plan on using our LiDAR to create an obstacle map, our encoders to follow our position, path planning to find a path to the point we want to drive to, and PID tuning to be sure we drive correctly. Since we had problems knowing where we currently are during a match, we think of adding another system for that, like beacons or a central tracking unit.
Last week, we started with a encoder-to-position system, that is really accurate in position.
This week we found out, that for lifting up the cans of the game, a 2.5kg electromagnet isn’t enough, so we ordered a bigger one. If lifting the cans via a magnet isn’t a great option, we will take a gripper like the last years. We also created a pathfinding algorithm in python, that we’ll use later on.
Next week, we will start on using the lidar to create an obstacle map.
(author: Emanuel)