Anne Hu

Partner: Daniel Barszczak

Date: 10/2/24

Goal:

Our goal for this project was to successfully play a game of sharks and minnows by remotely controlling our robot from another room. The specifications defined for this assignment were:

• See where your robot is going by mounting your phone and using Zoom to call in.
• Use Teachable Machines:
  • Thumbs Up to start the car
  • Open Palm to stop the car
• Use at least 2 motors, each controlled by a separate Pico
• Drive the car by having an OpenMV camera read different AprilTags

The process:

In this project, I was primarily responsible for the code and wiring, while Daniel was responsible for the mechanical design. In order for the wiring to match the physical design, we agreed upon the following:

1. The robot will be modular so that there are 2 physical manifestations:
   1. Minnow: The body of the robot will be elevated so that we pass over sharks attempting to block us
   2. Shark: The body of the robot is ridiculously long in order to block minnows
2. The robot will run off of a 12V lipo battery, and we’ll use a buck converter to step down the voltage to 5V for the Picos

Component 1 - OpenMV and AprilTags

Initially, we were going to use one AprilTag and read translations to indicate steering. The magnitude of translation corresponded to the magnitude of motor speed.

1. X-translations: left and right steering
2. Y-translation: increasing or decreasing speed

While this code did work, I determined through testing that being able to control this system would be difficult. In retrospect and in seeing other teams’ solutions, I could have built a rig for the AprilTag. This code is title aprilTags.py in my repository.

https://github.com/annehu32/sharks-minnows/blob/main/aprilTags.py