Fire Fighting Robot- Part 10 videos

Here are some videos of our test runs after our best trial runs. We were having problems with sensors detecting the candle, so most of the videos show the MotorCar spinning around trying to detect it.

In order to fix this problem, we had to re-print the values that the sensors read at those locations. It was a bit hard to do this because there was limited space for us to use because a lot of groups were using the floor space, so we weren't able to hook up our MotorCar to the computer whenever we wanted.

Another problem that we had was that the car deviated to the right after it centered on the candle at the starting line. We didn't really know why this occurred and we changed our program to try to fix this, for example we made our nudge smaller and less powerful, but the car kept shooting off to the right.

Here is a video of this:

By fixing the nudge, we were able to make the car deviate to the right less and it became less of a problem because even if the car beared to the right, it was able to see the candle at the halfway mark. In the video below, we came across this problem where the car did not stop when it was near the candle. The mechanism turned when the MotorCar was at a certain distance from the candle just like the program said but the car itself did not stop! This was so strange because we didn't have these problems before and we had not changed any part of the program. We were using the same basic program this whole time and it was strange that these problems arose when we had never seen them before.

Here is a video of this occurrence:

By the time of this video, the end of finals were coming and I had to leave for home. I had spent a lot of time working on this final challenge and although we had some successes, it was a bit disappointing to not have it work by the end of that night. Even though we were not able to extinguish the fire that night, we had learned a lot throughout this whole process about designing, programming and just trying to find a consistent and clever solution. Despite the challenges, this final project was a lot of fun and it was really satisfying when things worked exactly the way you wanted them to. I just wish that I had more time to carefully look over our program and to come up with a solution.