Pollution Tracking Buoyancy Controlled Robot
Mentor 1
Tom Consi
Location
Union Wisconsin Room
Start Date
24-4-2015 10:30 AM
End Date
24-4-2015 11:45 AM
Description
Whenever the city of Milwaukee receives a large rain fall its outdated sewer system combines the run off from the streets with the untreated waste its residents. This toxic mixture is then directed into Lake Michigan where it is left to disperse and dilute to safe concentrations. The Milwaukee Metro Sewage Department (M.M.S.D) knows that this is a problem; and this is why they gave the UWM- Robotics lab the task of constructing a robot that would be able to track the plume pollution and gather data on it until it dispersed to safe levels in order to learn more about the pollution plumes. The robot exploits Archimedes’ Principle (Law of Buoyancy) in order to move through the water by adjusting its volume making it more or less dense than water and therefore sinks or floats respectively. The robot has been designed and fully realized only leaving the controller, or the “brains”, of the robot to be designed. The controller is what is commonly known in robotics as a PID controller. This allows the robot to find a target depth and sit in the water at that depth. It does this by taking sensory data, in this case a pressure transducer used for calculating the depth of the robot, and calculates how far away it is from the target depth. It also accounts for the direction and speed of the robot along with what is known as “steady state error”. The design of the controller is underway using MatLab and Simulink software. The final step is to integrate the controller into the robot itself using its proprietary microcontroller software and language.
Pollution Tracking Buoyancy Controlled Robot
Union Wisconsin Room
Whenever the city of Milwaukee receives a large rain fall its outdated sewer system combines the run off from the streets with the untreated waste its residents. This toxic mixture is then directed into Lake Michigan where it is left to disperse and dilute to safe concentrations. The Milwaukee Metro Sewage Department (M.M.S.D) knows that this is a problem; and this is why they gave the UWM- Robotics lab the task of constructing a robot that would be able to track the plume pollution and gather data on it until it dispersed to safe levels in order to learn more about the pollution plumes. The robot exploits Archimedes’ Principle (Law of Buoyancy) in order to move through the water by adjusting its volume making it more or less dense than water and therefore sinks or floats respectively. The robot has been designed and fully realized only leaving the controller, or the “brains”, of the robot to be designed. The controller is what is commonly known in robotics as a PID controller. This allows the robot to find a target depth and sit in the water at that depth. It does this by taking sensory data, in this case a pressure transducer used for calculating the depth of the robot, and calculates how far away it is from the target depth. It also accounts for the direction and speed of the robot along with what is known as “steady state error”. The design of the controller is underway using MatLab and Simulink software. The final step is to integrate the controller into the robot itself using its proprietary microcontroller software and language.
