Week 5: Presentation #1

Today's Spartan Superway meeting started off with welcoming Ron back from his trip in South Africa. Dr. Furman announced that the Full Scale and Half Scale teams would be presenting today. Cheuk and I eventually got to pitch our presentation about our upcoming plans and ideas to create an efficient controls system for the Full Scale model. We explained in our presentation about the impact the controls team has on Full Scales team and our ideas to improve the existing model. For example, we informed that it would be in our best interest to implement an anti-collision system by implementing proximity sensors such as sonar sensors onto the podcar. This allows the podcar to stop if the sonar was to detect an object in front of the pod car. In addition, we suggested the implementation of an remote kill switch for the podcar for safety precautions. We talked about purchasing a DC motor with an encoder for an more accurate way of measuring position as opposed to the hall effect sensors. While mentioning the current state of the controls system, we explained the anticipated challenges that came along with implementing the new features to the pod car. Lastly, we addressed our approach to rapid prototyping as well as how the workload would be split up between Cheuk and I.

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