Week 7 – 10/12 to 10/16

We discussed getting our test arena built. Our options are to place an order for the machine shop to construct it for us or we can build it ourselves. We know that we want to construct a basic 8’x8’ plywood box. The walls and rooms vary in the contest so we decided that we want to construct moveable walls and rooms out of plywood to test our robot on various courses. We are looking into the cost of having the machine shop do this for us as to save time working on other aspects of our project. We want our test arena to be constructed by the end of November.

We decided that we want to build the frame of our robot out of plexiglass due to its durability, availability, and cost effectiveness. It is also electrically insulated which is a favorable property. We have also seen from our research of past robots that this is the most commonly used material for the body of the robot.

We also discussed our method for extinguishing the fire this week. We know that we want to try to use compressed gas. According the rules the flame will fall within a 5 cm range in the y-direction and we want to have our gas envelop that whole range in order to avoid the issue of aiming it in the y-direction. We only want to have to control the x-direction of our extinguisher. In order to avoid this problem we think that we need to design a device to disperse the gas over a wider range than the narrow nozzle typically found on spray dusters. Other options for extinguishing the fire are to spray water or to use an oscillating fan. The con of using water is that it could potentially damage our robot if the water spills anywhere on it. The con of using the fan is that it isn’t a practical method for extinguishing any size fire larger than a candle.