UNIFIED ROBOTICS I: Actuation

For this WPI Robotics Engineering course, students were required to build a robot for the purpose of autonomously maintaining a mock nuclear reactor. The robot had to retrieve spent fuel rods and place them into a designated stock slot. Once the spent rods were placed, the robot then had to locate a new fuel rod in a different storage location, acquire it, and then place it back into the reactor. This had to be done on both sides of the field in one run without any human intervention. Fuel rod locations were given via Bluetooth from a field computer to the robot.

Our group decided to navigate the field using odometetry based movement tracked by the encoders on the chasses, instead of using line following. This proved to increase the difficulty of the challenge and introduced drift. To compensate for this drift, a LiDAR was attached to correct based off of a known landmark.