13-01-2012, 02:01 PM
Fire Fighting Robot Team
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Introduction:
Robot is defined as a mechanical design that is capable of performing human tasks or behaving in a human-like manner. Building a robot requires expertise and complex programming. It’s about building systems and putting together motors, solenoids, and wires, among other important components. There are a number of subsystems that must be designed to fit together into an appropriate package suitable for carrying out the robot’s task. A firefighter robot is one that has a small fire extinguisher ad ded to it. By attaching a small fire extinguisher to the robot, the automaton put out the fires it detects can be achieved. The fire detection scheme to be put into use is relatively free of false alarms, it is anticipated that it will not overreact in non-fire simulations. As mentioned earlier, the design of the robot is according to specification of the contest.
Contest
The objective of the contest is to build a robot, which will extinguish a fire in the quickest time possible. A candle will represent the fire, which has started in the home and which the robot must find and then extinguish. The light level of th e surrounding in the testing area will be determined until the day of the competition. For this reason, a light sensor cannot be used to detect the fire. In order words, the robot must be able to make ambient light reading as part of its design complemen tation. However, it is assumed that the room will be lit by overhead high pressure sodium vapor lights. Knowledge of the surrounding light must be taken into consideration in order to make an appropriate fire sensor. Thus far, it seams like it will bet ter to utilize a heat sensor.
Technical data on the boards
The boards can be programmed using Assembly or Basic. The board can be programmed in basic because it has a basic interpreter chip it is also the CPU of the board. It is a parallax custom PIC16C57 microcontroller. When you program it you store s ymbols (called tokens) in the EEPROM memory. When you run your program the PIC retrieves the tokens from memory and interprets them as PBASIC instructions
Frame Design
After some research from past competition design, the team decided to use Lego blocks to construct the frame. The Lego blocks eases the process of constructing the robot since all the blocks were designed to fit each other. Using the Tube Bot fr om M.I.T. as a point of reference for designing, the team redesigned the gear box set up to change the center of gravity of the robots’ electric’s such as the micro-controller, batteries and sensors