Control Engineering

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RCTC - AIM
April 14, 2008

New Logo: ROBOT CLUB of Traverse City, MI (RCTC)

MONEY, MATERIALS
The ROBOT CLUB of Traverse City MI, meeting was Saturday at the AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL MAGIC workshop and Sandi, our new grant writer volunteer is finding a lot of things that we should apply for.  She also has a few wealthy friends who might be interested in supporting our work on Automatic Guided Vehicles.  In the past that is how most research and development was conducted, with the support of wealthy patrons.  Each DARPA Urban Challenge team must find its own sources of funding to cover the expenses of the work that needs done. There are a lot of people in the USA who can afford to support this work, if they want to.  Sold one jacket patch and several people wanted the 18 HP Kohler engine we have for sale, but no one had the $650 on them to buy it on the spot.  First person to pay for it gets it.  The pocket laser pointer/snake light was won in a drawing by Rich.  The snake light had been donated by the CRC Chemical Company.  Everyone in the USA will benefit from the work AIM is doing and I think if enough people know what we are doing they would like to chip in to support our life saving work. 

GOING TO THE MOON
Rich, who is also on Team FREDNET was saying that there has been a lot of progress made by the ten teams that are registered.  He showed the online video feed and teleoperation of the team vehicle in Ann Arbor Mi.  The Google Lunar X-Prize headquarters will be making an announcement soon of additional teams that are roomered to have joined.  Florida is still question mark as to how well they compare to the other moon launch services that are available.

LEGO MINDSTORMS
Josh forgot to bring his six wheel car (meant to look a bit like our truck) to show the group, he had had it here a few days earlier and some of the people got to see it then, he just didn't have it here on club day.  He is working with Roger in Austrailia to get it to parallel park.

RECRUITING
Thank you notes to the volunteers to date need to be sent out if anyone would like to help us with that.  A rough draft of the thank you letter is being passed among the members for comment.  Team dog tags were suggested, ID cards, a team ID coin were all suggested. Making the application process harder, might actually attract harder working people.  Certainly it would make being a member of the Robot Club or AIM seem like a more exclusive club which would appeal to some people.  At the moment getting AIM team is not hard, but staying on it requires hard work. 

DRIVING ON WOOD FUMES
It took Andy a bit of explaining to get across the idea that the wood was being converted directly into a combustable gas in the gasifier.  A small fire in the container of wood smolders and the smoke is combustable.  The fact that it is an air starved process and the fire directly heats the rest of the wood around it is a bit difficult to visualize.  Marker sketching on big sheets of paper helped get the idea across of what what happening inside the reaction chamber.  The advantages Andy sees is that once properly automated the process can be made continuious be adding wood blocks at the top while the ones at the bottom are being consumed.  The challenge is for Robot Club members to come up with the automation.  Gene's idea is to find industrial controls that can be simply purchased and applied as process controls.  Several equipment catalogs were in use by the cluster of people working on that after the club meeting.  I am looking forward to seeing what progress they make.  The Ford O2 sensor needs to be reading about 800 mV as both the quality of the fuel changes and as the load changes on the six 40 KW generator sets.  Ideally Andy would like to be able to parallel them and feed the grid.  I am not sure that he is going to be able to achieve the fine level of speed control reqired to do that, but they should be able to power independent loads without any problem.

SECRECY
What to talk about and what not to talk about publicly was one of the difficult topics of discussion.  Let's say you are a team like FREDNET competing for a $20 million dollar prize.  Don't tell anyone anything, right?  How much do you need to say about what you are doing to attract the people you need, the money  you need, the sponsors you need and how much would be giving away the store?   Sandi, who has worked for DoD projects though it was odd that I would be willing to let people walk through the shop and show them what we are working on and was not satisfied until I said that the secret stuff is not here in this shop.  She seemed happy with that explaination.  Perhaps if we were more secretive, more people would want to be on the team, to get the inside story of what is going on at AIM.  AIM is in the middle of changing the way we do things here.  More secrecy.  Perhaps a red herring or two to throw competitors off our trail?  

more to follow ...

GO ROBOTS !

Posted by Paul Grayson on April 14, 2008 | Comments (0)