DESIGN AND OVERVIEW


WHERE WE WORKED:

We thought that it would be only fitting to include a little snapshot of the "home" (and creation) of MAXX, our workbench in Sieg 327.

WHAT WE CREATED:

The final result of the MAXX project was a robot that had 3 modes (standby, object avoidance, and Remote Control).  The standby mode was the state entered into when the robot was powered on.  During this state, the robot would play a short bit from the Star Wars theme.  In the object avoidance mode, the robot would travel forward moving left and right attempting to avoid objects (this is more failure-prone when the batteries are nearly dead, as was apparent in the demonstration of MAXX).  The final mode allowed a person to control MAXX's movement using a television remote control.

ISSUES / PROBLEMS:

We ended up against a great time crunch because we had spent far too long on attempting to develop the high-level user-interface.  As a result, there were more modes and features that we are not able to implement.  Some of these unimplemented features are discussed in the extensions section of the site.  This time constraint also prevented us from fully testing MAXX, or adding the whiskers to complete the whisker collision detection system (although supported in the code, and in the hardware).  Batteries: during the last night of development, the robot's 6V (4 AA) battery pack died, thus causing us to use a 9V battery (which is not very good for the servos, because they are connection to Vin [unregulated voltage in, normally 6V, not 9V]).  The 9V battery worked for most of the development, until just prior to the demonstration when he 9V began to die.