The overall design of the robot proved to be a success. Caddy was able to perform all the tasks reliably and quickly. Unfortunately, the time constraints of the Roborodentia competition meant that full implementation and debugging of all the features was not completed until just after the competition so Caddy did not rank as well as it could have.

The following section describes some of the technical aspects that, in hindsight, we would have chosen to do differently.

Future Work

Regulated Motor Voltage

If we end up working with higher voltage motors again, it may be worth the added cost and decrease in power efficiency of regulating the motor voltage. This allows for more consistent operation across fully charged and partially charged batteries, especially with low precision wheel encoders that do not sense direction.

PWM Motor Control using a 16-bit Timer

Since we were using timer 1 (a 16-bit timer) for PWM, we could have used 16-bit PWM. 8-bit resolution seemed to be sufficient with the original 6 volts motors, but when we switched to 12 volt motors, more precise control of the PWM signal would likely have improved the PID line tracking.

Quadrature Wheel Encoders

Quadrature wheel encoders would have required more mechanical work (to mount the reflective IR sensors 90 degrees out-of-phase) and electrical work (wiring for twice as many sensors) but it would have helped solve some challenges with maneuvering the robot through precise sequences such as the bonus ball pickup.

Quadrature encoders would have allowed us to perform overshoot correction easily and accurately.