FourGuys-MecanumBase

Inspiration

This teams last years efforts were a primary inspiration for this project. The want to improve and expand upon last years learning drove this teams efforts. Another inspiration to include is frc and the cool robots to be seen within that community.

What it does

This robot uses mecanum wheels as it's main drive system. This drive system allows for traditional and strafing movement. Having a dynamic movement system like this as an expandable base platform allows for many opportunities and in our case was an opportunity to mount a nerf turret on the top. The autonomous function comes from a birds eye view mounted camera. This camera tracks april tags mounted on the robot and using Breadth First Search or BFS, a valid path from robot to target is planned with obstacle avoidance.

How we built it

We used a combination of 3d printed parts, tape, glue, servos, and ordered custom parts(mecanum wheels). For the software we used libraries such as open cv, pupil april tags, numpy, webrowser(open gitpage) and pygame.

Challenges we ran into

Bluetooth connectivity, threading in pygame, miscellaneous things not working were all major issues. Some of the biggest challenges we faced was with the nerf turret mounted on top of the robot. Due to these challenges we had to thin the project and removed it's pitch and yaw capability.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Although there have been many roadblocks and short coming our team is proud of this project and the individual efforts that went into it. More specifically our team is proud of the . Other than this project our team is proud of the support we were able to provide to others around us from being in physical attendance at this hackathon.

What we learned

Through this project we were able to learn what goes into programming a mecanum system, using esp32 bluetooth communication, computer vision and autonomous programing, and much much more. This project also allowed for the implementation of newfangled ideas such as feedback and feedforward loops for controlling different systems.

What's next for FourGuys-MecanumBase

After an analysis of this years work we may come back to the project to make a more complete version. Other than that I think this group of individuals has a future full of more projects.