Every action has a cause. Different people doing same action
may have different-different cause. As far as the my reason of pursuing M Tech
is concern, it was more related to acquire certain skills so that I can use
them in order to achieve my goal than to got a postgraduate degree. I wanted to
be a good designer of microcontroller based system. During my first semester I
along with classmate cum friend (Bhupendra) decided to make a microcontroller
based project. After few days I came to know about “Kshitij” annual technical
festival of IIT khadagpur which was going to organize on last week of January
2012. There was few robotic competitions were also going to organize. I found
one of them suitable for us according to our knowledge level and current
skills. The problem was to build a line follower robot and another robot which
follows the same path as follows by line follower robot. Both wired and
wireless communication was allowed between robots. Name of the competition was
STALK which was compatible with given problem.
I want to research on the line follower robot and for this I
downloaded so many related IEEE paper. For the first time I know that line
follower robot can be implement many different techniques like image processing
technique, through PID control or by using different types of sensor. I read
almost all of them and analyze with respect to our problem. We decided to use
Omniwheel and reflective optical sensor (CNY70). Instead of differential drive
technique used in most of line follower robot, we decided to use new type of
drive technique using omniwheel. Omniwheel was used to increase the DoF (degree
of freedom) of robot. After initial theoretical work had completed, we made
initial circuit diagram of different section of robot. Now it was time to jump
from theoretical world to practical things. So we purchase few things from shop
like stepper motor, wireless receiver and transmitter and dc motor. We wanted
to check circuits on bread board before we implement on PCB. There were mainly
four sections of our lovely robot:
1. DC
motor control
2.
Sensor
circuitry
3.
Wireless
transmitter and receiver
4.
Stepper
motor control
So we started our work in Electronics Lab (thanks to Vasanti
ma’am) on bread board. We bunked few lectures and during free time we rushed to
electronics lab for some days. Except dc motor control sections no circuit work
fine in one try. We needed to change the values of resistance and after
investing so much time and efforts; we found that everybody was working fine
except the stepper motor. Initially we wanted to control stepper motor and did
not get any success. Later we changed our strategy and were trying that at
least stepper motor move a bit. But stepper motor swore to not move a bit.
After some mischievous experiment finally stepper motor was agree to move a bit
but not every time. It was as reliable as street dog, may be dog will run after
you or not. We got stuck in this problem.
 |
| A project made by Rajkamal sir (www.rajkamal.org) now in dust at Electronics Lab. |
We tried for many days but still
didn’t able to catch any ray of hope. We were frustrated and disappointed
towards the future of robot. First semester examination was near and hence we
started to give less time to robot. But I was still hope for something good.
After examination, it was time to go home. At home, even if we were not sure
about the future of robot but we decided to make body of robots. Under the sun of uncertainty, with the help of
some skill people I had body of robots in few days. After few days I again
found myself in Indore and it was starting of next semester. We again tried but
result was same and unpredictable.
During those days I could smell the news of our robot in the
air of department still its future was quite uncertain. Krishna was also
willing to join and along with Devendra, we were now team of four. Krishna was
lucky fellow for all of us. He had previous experience of working with stepper
motor and he solved our problem up to significant extent. But still all was not
well…
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