Discussion of our Many Victorious Battles

Problems we encountered and overcame throughout our project.

One of the things we are very proud of is our use of homework as a resource to make our trajectory as smooth as possible. We incorporated 6-th order polynomials for all x-y-z axis to accomplish this. Therefore we had to solve for 18 unknown coefficients.

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Initial End Effector trajectory:

Trajectory Equations:

Compare this trajectory graph and equations to the one posted in the Results section. It is clear that this is a straight line, hence the shortest path between the End Effector Start position and End Effector End position (on top of the space bar).

As you may discover when solving the 'Final Question', we the Decepticons had to change our initial trajectory due to the our physical body constraints and the fact that the straight line trajectory forced us outside the boundary of our workspace.

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Also, a lot of our trials can be deemed unsuccessful if our home position is incorrectly set. Meaning it is crucial that the home position of the robot (which we are experts at eye balling) be consistent so that when the Matlab code is run the space bar is hit only once to play the music.

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One of our first learning experiences with the hardware was learning to build our own H-bridge (before we acquired industry made ones).

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We were also successful in building both our own circuit and the Bumble Bee's original control box. This was unfortunately not helpful because the control box interfered with the H-Bridges by stopping the Arduino microprocessor from sending signal to the motors.

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