Team Projects and Work Status


TReady

TReady is an afterschool robotics program designed by Marissa Powers and Orko Momin.  Right now, a group of 10-12 middle school students are taking part in this once a week extracurricular held on thursdays from 1pm-4pm at the Trinfo Cafe on Broad Street, Hartford. Students learn all about the fields of engineering and robotics.  Each group of three students will also build an autonomous robot using Mindstorm legos to take part in the Junior Division of the Trinity International Fire Fighting Robot Competition in April.  TReady is funded by the Urban Being Grant, and hopes to have a successful inaugural semester, paving the way for many to come.

 

Q

The Q unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) project is the successor to the long-standing ALVIN platform. Q came back from the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition held in Detroit in June 2007. It won the 8th position in the Navigation Challenge and 12th position in the Autonomous Challenge.

The relative success at IGVC was due to the development of a solid mechanical platform with a powerful and reliable drive system as well as a very effective drive control system. This platform has allowed the current team to focus on developing the software architecture and integrating newly acquired sensors. The newest acquisition is the SICK LMS-200 laser range finder. This will replace the sonar sensor array used in the previous implementation of Q. It will increase the field of vision of the robot (up to 180 degrees) and give it a larger range (up to 80m). Currently, the SICK has been mounted on the front side of the robot. A new GPS unit has been installed and work is being done on e-stops, remote controlled e-stops, RC antanna, Lead-Acid battery, laptop mount, and the bnody cover. On the software front, work is being done in interprating the data spitted out by the SICK and in trying to replace the older sonar array data with this data for navigation. The JAUS software architecture is being incorporated into the system and is expected to be done by March 15. Possibilities for a third camera and dynamic image processing are being looked into.

The sections within the team and their goals are listed below:

Intelligence: Further develop the current obstacle avoidance algorithm to include a more intelligent path planner.

JAUS: Develop a modular and JAUS-compliant system architecture.

Simulation: Develop an environment using an available simulator to test algorithms developed in LabView.

SICK Laser range finder: Develop the electrical and software interface so the LMS-200 can be integrated into the current LabView based control system used in Q.

Mechanical: Design and fabricate a mounting system for the LMS-200, laptop mount, body cover, GPS mount.

Image Processing: Optimizing existing real-time line extraction and texture detection algorithms.

Members:

Neil Robertson '08 (Team Leader / SICK)

David Pietrocola '08 (RST Chief Engineer / JAUS)

Nabil Imam '08 (Intelligence/JAUS)

Adam Fine '08 (Simulator/Intelligence)

David Maliniak '08 (Mechanical)

Kumud Nepal '09 (SICK/Image Processing)

Orko Momin '10 (Simulator/Image Processing)



Swarm

Swarm is a project similar to the Justice League which has been retired.  The new swarm is going to have about four robots working together to find out a candle and a baby in the expert division of the Fire-Fighting Contest. It is going to have RF communication protocol to make the finding job easier.  Current work is being done in mechanical designs of the swarm robots. Work has been completed for communication an time division multiple access alogirthms. One protype is fully functional and is running

At a Glance

Project Duration: 2 semesters

Members:

Sagar Bhandari '09 (Team Leader)
Sagar Chowdhury '08
Prasanna Gautam '11
Marissa Powers '09
Simon Lin '11

 

Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek is a project for the concept maze in the Annual Fire Fighting Contest held at Trinity. The concept maze has a beacon which represents a baby and the robots have to go around the maze to seek the heat from the beacon and find the baby. The quickest robot wins the competition.  Currently, work is being done to make hide and seek have two robots in the firefighting competition. Both will compete in the hide and seek competition, and one will actually compete in the firefighting competition (the one using the handyboard). The one that is competing in the firefighting competition will use the Versa valve set up. The actual set-up is yet to be determined team members are still working out/testing a design for it.

At a Glance

Project Duration: 2 semesters

Members:

Adam Wright  '10
Anant Raut '11