The StoryFive years following their adventures on Paradise Falls, Kevin, Dug, Russell, and Carl have teamed up again to defeat the evil DrEd. Due to the toxic leakage from DrEd's facility, the swamp is impassible to all conventional vehicles. But the team is highly experienced in balloon powered vehicles and have created a Swamp Penetrating Electronically Controlled Tactical Reconnaissance Explorer (SPECTRE) that will be able to hover its way through the swamp. And they have cleverly disguised their Mechatronic Integrated Interactive Intelligent Infrastructure Intrusion Interface (MI6) as one of their very own! Kevin!
The Game |
Each game round is a competition between a fleet of Free SPECTREs and Mind Controlled SPECTREs. The Free SPECTREs have a balloon attached to their aft end. Their goal is to disable the DrEdStar by popping all six balloons on it. The goal of the Mind Controlled SPECTREs is to take control of the Free SPECTREs by popping their balloons. Once a Free SPECTRE gets its balloon popped, it becomes Mind Controlled. The game continues until the DrEdStar is disabled or all of the Free SPECTREs are defeated.
SPECTRE (Hovercraft)
The hovercraft was outfitted with two propellers for driving and steering. A gyroscope was also mounted on the SPECTRE and a PD control routine was written to prevent the craft from spinning out of control. The control routine compensated for rotation about the center by powering the propellers to turn in the opposite direction. To brake the craft, the hover fan was turned off. A safety pin was attached to the end of a door lock motor for the balloon popping mechanism. To know if the SPECTRE was being controlled or not, there was a spinning bunch of balloons mounted above the house.
MI6 (Controller)
The controller had a potentiometer dial to select which SPECTRE to connect with. A bright green LED indicated whether the controller was paired with a SPECTRE or not. A joystick was used to control the hovercraft. Pulling back on the joystick would apply the brakes. Inside of the controller, a Bosch BNO055 9-axis absolute orientation sensor was mounted. To pair with a SPECTRE, the user had to spin around in the counterclockwise direction for 2 seconds. To unpair, the user had to spin clockwise for 2 seconds. This was done using the gyroscope on the Bosch board. To deploy the balloon popper, the user had to jump. This was done using the accelerometer on the Bosch board.
Communication
Radio communication between the SPECTRE and the MI6 was done using an XBee radio module (using Zigbee standards). This two-way communication occurred at a rate of 5Hz. Below is our communication protocol.
communicationprotocol.pdf | |
File Size: | 513 kb |
File Type: |