Initial Mark I Run

Here are some videos from the test runs. In the first three videos I just created a program to go forward for 3 seconds, turn right 3 seconds, turn left 3 seconds, backwards 3 seconds.

1/4 full power. Didn't fix the problems with the drive train yet:

Tightened down the belts and tried it again at 1/4 power:

Try again at 1/2 full power. Much better:

So now I wanted to load the control program I wrote earlier onto another computer and see if I could control it remotely. Fortunately, I was watching my friend's dog Katy for the week so it made the experiment a lot more fun.

Now I need to tune the drive belts so they move roughly in synch and retune the turning code so that I can get more precise directional control.

After that I need to decide if I should start adding some input sensors, build encoders for the motors so that I can precisely control their movement or just go ahead and buy the video camera and try to work around the movement idiosyncracies.