NatProposal

Memorandum

Date: September 14th, 2001
To: William Sitch
From: Nathalie Klaesi-Van, Student number 215279
Subject: Fourth year project proposal for 97.497 Robo Flag.

This is the project proposal for the fourth year course 978.497, also called the RoboFlag project, written in response to your request for a proposal. The RoboFlag project has started in September 2001 and will continue a full eight months until April 2002. The members of our team are John Danson who is the Electrical Designer, Steven Lougheed our Software designer, and myself Nathalie Klaesi-Van, the Manager and Systems Designer. Our team has decided to use the name team one until we have picked a better name. The supervisor of team one is William Sitch, a Carleton University electrical engineering graduate.

Objective:
The objective of RoboFlag is to build one autonomous mobile robot that will play capture the flag in an 8' by 16' arena. Our robot will compete against the 5 other robots built by the other teams who are also enrolled in this course. Another component of our project is to have our robot play cooperatively with another robot against another pair of robots while navigating the arena. Our team goal is to learn all about robots, to design the best one we can, to make the robot robust and well designed, and hopefully, to win the competition. My goal as the manager of the team is to ensure we all stay on track, to schedule the meetings, to generate plans and fallback plans, to fund raise, to make a cost-effective budget, to motivate the team, to do the design dealing with the beacons and to aid my teammates in hardware and software design of the robot.

Motivation:
The field of robotics has always been of interest to me since they have a great potential in making people's lives easier. After being part of designing and building a robot I will have a greater understanding of what kind of applications robots are suited for, and how to utilize this resource. I'm especially interested in robots used to aid disabled people, for example as eyes for the blind or to produce a "smart" wheelchair. Another motivating factor for me is to gain experience in the management field, by becoming a better leader, by raising funds and by keeping the team on schedule. If I'm ever part of a startup company these skills will be indispensable.

Technical Overview:
As a group we have decided on some basic strategies. We chose the handicap of using sonar in our design to detect walls and to do some basic navigation. We also determined early on that we want to make our robot robust to be able to withstand the jarring motion of other robots and walls bumping us. We still haven't found the optimal balance between speed and weight of the robot, but since we are considering stepping motors our robot will probably be on the slow side already.

Schedule:
Our tentative schedule is laid out in the following Gantt chart. For my individual milestones I have decided to the following:

Sept 17:                 Finish the team web site. (www.geocities.com/robo_flag/)
Sept 16 - Oct:        Raise funds. Decide on all the sensors together with the team. Make a budget. Calculate the costs and order the parts, research the sensors.
Sept 23 - Oct:        Aid the design of both hardware and software to get ready for the design review, do more research on interfacing sensors, keep sponsors posted on our progress.
Oct 5:                   Design review.
Oct - Nov:             Beacon/PIC interfacing.
Nov 24:                 Basic demo.
Nov 25 - 30:          Work on progress report.
Dec 3:                   Progress Report due.
Jan. 6 - 20:            Prepare the oral presentation, start working on the final report, rehearse for presentation, make slides for presentation.
Jan 21-25:             Oral Presentations.
Jan 26 - Feb:         Get ready for in house demo, make casing for robot, start technical chapter draft, keep working on final report.
Feb 16:                 In house demo.
Feb 16 - Mar.        Fix any problems experienced in the in-house demo, keep sponsors informed about the competition.
Feb 25:                 Technical chapter draft due.
Mar 13:                 Final competition.
Mar 15:                 Peer review.
Mar 16:                 In house competition.
Mar 25:                 Final report draft due.
April 8:                  Final report due.

Thank you for taking the time to look at our teams objective, motivation, technical overview and our tentative schedule. Please contact me by email at [email protected] or call me at (613) 234-0215 if you have any comments or questions, or if you require further information.

Sincerely,

Nathalie Klaesi-Van, 215279

Encl.:                   of proposed project schedule.