Simon Lau » School

School Out…Trip Time!

Simon — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:50:04 +0000

I finished my last undergraduate exam on Wednesday and for the past few days I’ve been getting ready for my trip. It was a good feeling to be done, five years of which one was spent working with Petro-Canada as an intern. I’ll be rejoining them July 7th as a Plant Engineering and it’ll be nice to see everyone again. In the meantime, there is a lot more trip planning and packing to do. Expect more blog posts as the days leading up to my departure gets closer and closer. We’ve have nearly finalized all of our accommodations, just waiting for one apartment to confirm. If I don’t hear from them Monday, I will start making phone calls.

I’ll be carrying an old MEC Brio 70 that will house my stuff and Karen’s. I’ll be bringing along my laptop and PDA (GPS) so that will add to the weight as we move around in Italy via train. Regardless it should be a ton of fun.

Here are the cities we’ll be visiting and the order it’ll occur in: London, Venice, Milan, Florence, Pisa, Rome and finally Paris before returning home June 10th.

UofT MIE443: RoboPong

Simon — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:02:09 +0000

This was my final project as a undergraduate student, our team was to design a robot that would push practice golf balls up a ramp and deposit them on to the opponents playing field. They of course will be doing the same thing to us. After two minutes of play, the winner was determined by who had more balls remaining on their side. We unfortunately went 1 for 3 and lost one match by approximately 1/3 of a golf ball. I would say that was a tie given the poor workmanship of the playing field.

I have six pictures before the break, a video followed by another batch of photos. The design is quite ingenious with the rotating sensor arm. The robot is definitely not as fast as some of the other kickers, but it is far more interesting and better designed for the class.

Here is the YouTube video followed by some more photos.

MIE443 RoboGolf Contest

Simon — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:44:10 +0000

The rules of the game were quite simple: build a robot out of lego parts and off-the-shelf sensors that would pick up a golf ball and deposit in a hole and repeat this several times while another robot is doing the same on the other half of the playing field.

It sounds simple, but the hardware was far from ideal. Sensor threshold values often tripped on smudge on the board and line following wasn’t completely perfect. On our third and final run, we managed to get some success and show cased our autonomous robot to the professor. I hope he liked it and will give us a good grade on the report as well as what we engineered.

For your viewing pleasures, here are a few photos of the robot. We used a total of 6 light sensors (2 for line following, 2 for identifying if a golf ball was captured, 1 to follow the wall and a final one to determine which side of the playing field the robot is on). There is also one touch sensor that gets activated to turn the robot.

More images and videos after the break.

During the competition, we were allowed to reset the robot as many times as we liked. You’ll see us grab the robot and bring it back to the starting point when things go awry. During the 2 minute competition, we were able to get 3 balls in but we still lost the game. We put up a good fight but it just wasn’t good enough. Nonetheless, I think we had a great design that was only flawed by the the motherboard we were forced to use that was built by a graduate student working at Honeywell. Enjoy the video.

MIE443 – Mechatronics System – Competition #1: RoboCan

Simon — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 03:38:12 +0000

This morning was the first competition for my Mechatronics System. The task was to build a robot using Lego parts and a custom programmable motherboard to “kick” cans out of a circle.

The premise of our robot is to line follow the outside circle. Once the arm reaches a can, triggered by a touch sensor, it will swing and knock it out of the circle.

I foolishly forgot to bring my camera this morning to the actual competition but I made a video of it on Monday, the day before the competition.

The logic of the robot changed ever so slightly, instead of only turning for a set amount, the robot would continue swinging its arm until the light sensors “sees” the circle. It will then swing in the opposite direction back into the proper orientation and continue moving on until it finds another can.

While this logic takes slightly longer to execute, you know it will always make it back to the moving forward direction. It does not rely on any encoder positions which can be prone to errors.

Here’s a video of the robot working on it’s old logic. If I get a copy of the robot in action from today, I’ll throw it up on youtube. The next competition is called “RoboGolf”. More info on that when the competition day draws closer.