My courses at Mudd have been more on the abstract side lately, so I was in the mood to do a more hands-on project. After working with the SuperNURDs this semester, I was inspired to build a robot of my own this summer. After much thought, I decided to build a metal-detecting robot. Over the course of the season, we've spent a lot of time analyzing FRC games, and I've been thinking about how cool it would be to build a robot for terrain other than the standard carpet-with-obstacles that FIRST usually goes for. Like sand, or ice. Then I saw a tutorial online for how to make a metal detector. I put the two ideas together, and decided to build a treasure-hunting beach robot.
The most basic version is a remote-controlled robot with built-in metal detector, that can be driven on sand (i.e., the beach), and indicates to the user when it has found metal, maybe by beeping. However, there are a lot of other features I'd like to build in if time allows. I would love to make it able to drive autonomously, to roam around the beach looking for metal the way that Roombas drive around rooms. I would keep some control over it though- at the very least, I want to be able to tell it to stop, or turn around, if it starts heading toward the water or a group of people. It would be really cool if it could sense when it's getting too close to the water and turn itself around- I've seen some projects where people used moisture sensors to monitor when their plants need to be watered, so it should be possible to give the robot the ability to know when it's near the waves. I plan to make it as waterproof as possible, but I would still like to have a remote-control failsafe. I also want to set up a live video feed from the robot to my computer, so that I can see where it's going.
If I get those things working before summer ends, I'm going to build in the capability to collect the metal it finds. There are two pieces to it: digging in the sand, and picking up and storing the metal. The digging part shouldn't be too difficult to work out- I think the biggest challenge will be teaching it to recognize and pick up the pieces of metal it digs up.
So those are the features I've been thinking about for the robot. In my next post, I'll explain the parts and resources I've collected so far.
