What is it like to build a robot from the very basic script?
I made a robot that would be remote controlled with camera feed going back to the driving person. And it was not based on a traditional platform. I had to design every aspects of it.
In the fall term, when the school had just started, I also started a project that took me more than a year to finish. I knew how difficult it would be, but also that I would learn a lot. While working on this project, I learned a ton of skills.
It was an robot with two wheels, and a camera. I had to work from the very basic components of it, I built the circuits myself. It contains two motors, a motor controller, rechargeable batteries and a raspberry pi, which is a really small computer that can control everything.
Another hard part was that I had to fit all of it in a cylinder and keep the cylinder smaller than the wheels so that the wheels could share an axis with the body.
The reversion of the 3D printing to fit everything was hard. I had to measure and design screw holes to fit the upper lid and the bottom together. And lastly, the Raspberry Pi, which is responsible for controlling the robot, was an equally challenging aspect of this project. Raspberry Pi runs on Linux, so I had to become a Linux expert to set up things and fix anything that went wrong.
I really learned a lot though. I set the robot up so that anyone using it can connect to the Wi-Fi and log in to the robot’s ip address. The feedback from the camera will then be on the webpage and the keyboard will control the robot.
