This section gives a brief overview of the different subsystems in our robot.  For more detailed and technical descriptions, see the "Mechanical Design" and "Circuitry" sections.

Driving

The driving subsystem acted as the base of the robot, upon which everything else was built.  It consisted of the powertrain, an H-bridge, and sensors (IR, ultrasonic) for closed loop positioning.  

Shooting and Loading system

Our ball reloading system

We decided on having a dual fly wheel system that would launch out our wildfire. Our loading system is a stepper that will drop wildfire into the cannon one at a time. 

wildfire shooter

IR Tower Sensing

Early IR Concept

The IR sensor is a relatively straight forward idea. Mounted onto the cannon, we have a shielded IR photo-transistor that is connected to a simple signal conditioning analog circuit that allows the Teensy to detect the frequency of IR signals found in the front of the cannon. Given the relative selectivity of the sensor, the Teensy will basically only have good readings when directly aiming at any of the IR beacons on the board. The shielding is necessary to focus the field of the photo-transistor more in a single direction, further increasing the accuracy of the system. Of course, there are some drawbacks, namely, it takes time to calculate frequency, and the less time the Teensy takes, the less accurate the reading is. So a optimization has to occur between instantaneous readings such that the robot can react more quickly to a found target, and actual accurate readings on whether the correct target has been found (this is a classic issue for a Fourier transform in general so there's no real way of getting away from it).