Engineering Design Project: The Final Task
As alluded to in previous posts, the final challenge involved having the modified robot navigate the obstacle course and catch ping pong balls fired from our custom launchers. Finally, I have been able to complete the challenge!
The task took many attempts, as judging the range of my launcher proved to be very difficult. I really enjoyed how all the previous elements of this project combined into one seamless system during this task — the hard work paid off! Before I continue to discuss the task, here's a clip of how I got on!
Unfortunately, my launcher mount broke during the process of making this video so I had to do without! In a future test, I would most certainly fix the launcher as this would help with the consistency of its range.
I decided to only attempt to fire one ping pong ball from the launcher. One of the requirements for the assignment was that all of the energy the launcher uses to propel balls must be readily available before the robot leaves its post. In other words, it was against the rules to manually reload the launcher. Thus, to overcome this, I decided to compromise and use just one ball; so I didn't have to reload the launcher, but showed that the launcher mechanism works as intended.
Despite the fact that this task took many repetitive attempts, I was, overall, very pleased with how it turned out. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to accomplish what I set out to do at the outset of this entire project, but everything seemed to come together in a very satisfying way.
That’s it for this project blog, thanks for reading!
