Construction of the Obstacle Course
9th April
While I have a specific blog on the obstacle course that encompasses everything from navigating the course and firing the ping pong balls that you can find here. However, we’ve been tasked with writing a blog that covers its construction. I’ve explained a bit in the main Obstacle Course blog but here’s a quick refresher. There’s a bit of overlap but you’ll find the majority of the technical building aspects here.
I drew up a really simple CAD design to help visualise this course a lot more. It’s just to help us get a better sense of design parameters and various lengths.
Construction Materials
10th April
Obviously, the obstacle course won’t be too fancy given the limited supplies I have. I’ll construct the course out of cardboard and masking tape. The parameters show the course to be 200cm x 60cm. I’ll also need a bit of space behind the bottles to fire the balls from. Much to my family's annoyance, I’ve commandeered the sitting room.
Building
It’s all pretty self-explanatory. I marked out the various dimensions so I’d be able to accurately place the cardboard pieces. I outlined a box for where the bottles would be. The next step is to add the cardboard.
Problem with Dimensions
I’ve come across a small problem.
The robot is longer than the ‘hard’ mode specified of 15cm. Therefore I’ll be going with the ‘easy’ mode for the time being of 20cm
Well here’s the course for the time being. I’m unilaterally working on navigating it and the code at the same time so some changes may have to be made. I may have to add more obstacles to help the sensors work, but I’ll know more when I get further on in the code. In the meantime, here’s my cat at the course.
Update on the Course
13th April
As predicted, we made a few adjustments to the course. To help with navigation, I added 2 boxes for the sensors to work off to navigate the course. I also added more bottles for the sensors to also operate off to hit X (which marks the spot!). There were also some updates to the course parameters which I’ll post below:
As I had previously spotted, the width ‘a’ was too narrow. This has been adjusted to the new ‘hard’ mode of 25cm. We’ve also been given a bit of leeway with the course design. This is important because although I could navigate the course with just the robot. The size of the bucket leaves less room for error. To illustrate the new changes I’ve drawn a quick sketch to help illustrate the changes slightly better.
Despite my dodgy scanner, the drawing shows the small differences in the course under the new rules. The obstacles b and c can be anywhere within the 50–130cm range. So I’ve spaced them out to give as much space as possible. I now have a good 40cm between each obstacle.
Further Course Adjustments
15th April
A final adjustment I made to the course was to change the height of the cardboard obstacles. There were no official requirements for height. I reduced it to:
- Allow better filming of the course
- Ability to navigate better with the bucket added.
Well, this is the final design of my course. This blog wasn’t extremely technical, so make sure to check out my main obstacle course blog here. This blog was mainly to just show the process behind the building of the course so the main blog could focus far more on the code, navigating the course, and collecting the balls.
