So IGVC is a robotics competition, well an intelligent ground competition to be exact. The challenge is to design, build, and compete with a mobile autonomous vehicle that you're team came up with. So for our entry we picked the name Nameless Microwave thanks to a random punk band name generator, and we were off like a rocket with design for the bot. Now in the lab there had been these Rovers that had just been sitting there for god knows how long to the point where there speed belts were gone, there was a leak in the hydraulic pump and no one could remember if they ran or not since they hadn't been taken outside in forever. We decided to use these as our base for our competition bot and since the lab conveniently had two of these things laying around we were going to make carbon copy bots just on the outside chance we had a complete hardware meltdown while at the competition. And so the Nameless Microwaves gained the bots affectionately known as Thing 1 and Thing 2. Once again being the hardware lead [what can I say I like have a tangible finished project] I had to get these bots to the point where they actually ran so that we could start designing and changing them while maintaining an inherent base functionality. So my hardware team and I went grease monkeys for awhile and changed speed belts, plugged the hydraulic pump leaks, got the motor running, secured gas lines [yes it is gas powered] till we finally got it running. YAY! So the video below is a little old but I remembered I had already posted it somewhere, so its a video of after we'd gotten everything repaired and running to show it could work. I'll try and put up some more recent stuff once I get done with a demo run of another project I'm doing. ^^
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