Control systems - The improvements

All of the groups which were taking part in this task decided to go forward with the ShooterBot. They would all build and program the ShooterBot. Because of this we realised that we had competition and we wanted to make ours unique. We decided to improve the mobility so it could find targets quicker and do its job quicker. As the movement of the robot was a little slow we decided to replace the movement system. It was a track that the robot run on to move about. As it was not as fast as it could be we replaced it with rubber wheels. There was a huge boost in mobility.

As time was an issue the programming for the robot wasn't as good as it could be. It was a quick and simple design we used to make sure that the robot was 100% working otherwise we would of had to keep going back and making changes. An issue that I personally found frustrating was that the loop system would keep on going. For example the robot would detect an object which would travel past and ShooterBot would shoot at it, but would carry on shooting until the loop had finished. With some fine tuning of the programming we could have prevented this.

A improvement that could be made in the future is that the ShooterBot could move towards the objects once it's detected, but at the same time stay a certain distance away from it so that it didn't crash. This would have to include some sort of detection of any object around it to stop it from crashing at all. This way the robot could keep targeting the object until it's completly gone.