The vertical and horizontal control of the new design:
Vertical control on the newly design balloon: We will start testing horizontal control shortly.
Old custom balloon: Newly design balloon: Compared with previous balloon, the newly design balloon has better shape for our capture mechanism. And the leakage situation is also better after we imporve and iterate our manufacturing process.
After testing our previous active caputure mechanism, we found that one is pretty unstable, so this week, we tried another passive capture mechanism. And it worked nice. During the test, we did find some bugs that we need to fix. We'll try to fix that this week.
We tried one of our designs on the fish balloon. Tested vertical and horizonal control under Opti-track system:
We've tested the different thrust using Crazyflie blimp setup. The 80% thrust and 100% thrust: It is noticed that 100% thrust will generate more swing motion on the spherical balloon which doesn't have the stable mechanism (fin for example)
New red 4-side balloon: Manufacturing process: (1) Setup (2) Draw a shape of balloon (3) Heating and cutting
Gripper open state: Gripper closed state: The demo of ball capture mechanism: After the experiment, we found that it needs to imporve: (1) The gripper is too heavy for the servo motor to pull. (2) The servo motor is too weak, need to change to a more powerful motor.
Recall that our previous conceptial design: They are either too heavy or too unstable to put on a balloon so we discarded those designs. After several iterations of design and 3D printing, we got closed to our final design: To make sure all the assembly is correct, we built a integrated...
Last week, I tried different ways of manufacturing balloon. And it turned out the soldering iron way is the best way for one person to do that in the lab. Last Friday, I successfully manufactured one in the lab, as shown in the following figures. And the following figure is what happened afte...