February 12, 2011: Great Progress!

These last two weeks have been very productive - too productive, in fact, to leave time to post. Most of the progress has been on three areas: the robot's line tracking for autonomous mode, the lifting arm for hanging the tubes on the wall, and Little EVA deployment. And boy do we have some progress. Here's a video from Thursday of the robot tracking the forked line that we've set up on some carpet.

This next video, from a few days ago, shows prototyping work on the lifting arm.

But today, the arm was fully mounted, and we got it to hang tubes on a wall equivalent to that on the competition field. Watch the first tube be hung, with Mike driving:

This is the winch that powers the arm. The grey cylinder, a Fisher-Price motor, is controlled by a Victor motor controller between the braces for the gearbox stand.

The current version of the arm is only able to reach the middle level pegs, but ideas have been floated to extend its range, and about Little EVA deployment. Perhaps some of them will come to fruition tomorrow.