Navigation Sensor

Rolling Robots InvenTeam

Hey everyone, I’m Nolan! I’ve never made an independent blog post before, but I did give a quick entry into our February post a while back. Thought I’d just give some updates on what I’ve been working on since then.

As I mentioned in the post from some months back, I’ve been mainly tasked with assisting in developing the physical housing of our devices that will allow our walker to navigate to the user automatically. 

Sensor and housing

We use the device on the left in order to essentially get how far away the user is from our walker's position. It does this simply by sending a signal from the top of the device, as circled in orange, to the user, and waiting for the signal to return. And although this gives us a rough idea of how far we are, we have no idea the direction the user is in. To solve this, I’ve been developing a special “housing” unit for the device in order to direct the signal it sends out, so that it only receives the signal back when it's pointing in the right direction. 

This description is of course a slight simplification, but by using three of these devices inside of the housings, we are able to use some math to now find not only how far away we are from the user, but also in which direction they’re in! 

Simplification

Now although the housing may sound quite simple, the math and physics behind it are very complicated, and beyond my level of understanding (as of now 😉). So, I have instead used a trial-and-error method of developing the housing, with its current version being far more effective and snug fitting.

Blown out 3d model

While giving some results with varying success, our housing can always be improved. In the coming couple weeks, I plan to vastly iterate the housing we have now, greatly changing its size and design as I learn more about the physics of how the device works. I will hopefully get the chance to improve this system even beyond EurekaFest!

The highs and lows are from the spinning of the device, indicating how much we’ve rotated

Well, that’s the primary contribution I’ve been working on recently! I hope that all goes well in the future for us and our peers’ teams. Have a wonderful day and we’ll see you all at EurekaFest!