My Senior Project

Here's another thing you may not know about. Above is a picture of my Senior Project. Looks quite odd doesn't it. I was in a team of four people and was chosen to be the group leader both semester since no one else wanted that burden. We ended up deciding to make an autonomous vehicle that can find its way around barriers to a home base. That green thing on the top of the car is my ZARX board...well, it is not mine anymore since one of my group members decided that she got to keep the entire project without anyone else having a say. People are so kind sometimes when they have always seemed to get their way with everything. Well, on that board is a Rabbit 3000 microcontroller, an Altera FPGA, some Basic Stamps, buttons and a bunch of other fun stuff that means nothing to most people. This is what basically controls the whole vehicle, the A.I. if you will. These controllers contain programs that receive signals, determines what to do, sends signals, and basically controls everything else in the project. I am not really going to go into too much detail here. On the top of the post thing on the car is the cars beacon. The other thing next to the car is basically the home base which consists of the other part of the beacon system. These are two infrared systems that continuously switch between sending and receiving IR signals in the four different directions. With this the vehicle can tell which direction the home base is. Surrounding the vehicle you can see the seven infrared object detection sensors. These send a signal telling if their is an object in that direction and how far away it is. This is used to avoid the barriers that may be set up between the vehicle and home base. You may also see a flashlight on the front of the vehicle. That is there to light the area where we have our color sensor. This sensor sends a frequency representing the color it is sensing, which in this case would be the floor color. We used this to determine when the home base is reached. All this and a whole lot of wiring and coding and the project turned out to work quite well. We could set up a room with all sorts of barriers and as long as their was a path to get to the home base it would be able to find its way there. Their were a lot of difficult things that the group overcame to get it all working. Now it is done, we all passed, and I am glad. Not glad about everything with that project and group... but I am glad it's over.