Minos is upon us. It is now possible to register for the 2012 Minos event which takes place on April 14th and 15th at Royal Holloway, University of London., Our twelfth weekend conference on micromouse and other robotics related matters follows the success of previous MINOS events. We will also run a contest on the Sunday
When I applied power to the motors on Zeetah VI (ZVI) for the first time, the motors seemed to struggle and the PWM value to get the wheels to rotate seemed higher than usual. Since this was my first four wheel mouse of this configuration (ZIV is a four wheel drive, four wheel steer mouse), I wasn’t sure if the higher load was normal or not.
Having seen quite a lot of variability in the output from the encoders on my micromouse, I got to wondering how much backlash there really is in the gear train. Finally, I figured the easiest way to measure it would be to send the motors back and forward alternately while holding the wheels still and record the total amount of movement directly from the encoders…
Find out how …
You could be forgiven for thinking that a micromouse contest – particularly the All Japan micromouse contest – is one of the most photographed and filmed events there are. All day there are cameras going. Pretty well all of the resulting imagery does not get to see the light of day. Perhaps most notable are the professional videos being taken by NVS. While talking to one of the cameramen, Harjit Singh discovered that the action is streamed live over Ustream. Look out for it next year. In the meantime, he has found a link to the footage from 2011:
A wheelchair configuration micromouse has the wheels in the middle and skids at either end. Those skids cannot both be on the ground at the same time or, when the mouse encounters a step in the maze surface, the drive wheels will be lifted off the ground and the mouse may come to a halt. But, if there is too much clearance, the mouse will be able to rock back and forth quite a lot. It turns out that can have quite a big influence on behaviour…
The walls and posts arrived and so it was time to finish the maze floor.
Analog Devices recently release new vibration rejection gyros which seemed a perfect fit for use on a micromouse. Since I was using the ADXRS610 on Zeetah V, I temporarily mounted an ADXRS642 to ZV to compare the two.
Finally, a way to solder the Analog Devices ADXRS610 gyro… The last time we attached a gyro, we overheated the board and the board delaminated. This time, we use a skillet and avoided that problem.
It is the time of year to start thinking about the important things in life. Like the 2012 MINOS event next April at Royal Holloway college. This annual robotics and micromouse conference will be running for its 12th successive year. The proposed dates are April 14th and 15th 2012.
Most commonly, micromouse reflective sensors use Infra Red LEDs as the emitter component. That is all very well and suits many, or most, phototransistors. the thing is, you cannot easily see where they are pointing and what kind of illumination they are providing. Here is a sample of 13 different emitters…
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マイクロマウス 마이크로마우스 micromouse
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