At the Siemens Technical Academy it is common to attend a project, which lasts the whole 2nd semester. By doing this project, the purchases between the theoretical and practical things are guaranteed. The fulfillment of those projects was, is and will be always a special challenge. All the gathered knowledge, such as programming and constructing skills, from the 1st semester could be implemented. Another benefit of those 2nd semester projects is that the learning speed during challenging the project is on such a high level, which can’t be reached by exercising normal lessons. But those projects are not only focusing at technical skills. Also presenting, cost monitoring, team working and particularly writing documentations are focuses

Task

The task for the mechatronic classes in the summer semester 2006 was, to develop, create and program a driverless transportation system. The general idea was, to create a map of a closed classroom with all the outer boundaries and inner obstacles. That map should finally be visualized with MATLAB. But as this task wasn’t difficult enough, the base area of the system should have only DIN A4 size, the main motion system should be realized by belt or chains and it should return to its origin, in case of an empty battery.

Research and Planning

Everything began with the research and planning process. As it is one aim of the second semester project at the Technik Akademie, we were thrown in nearly frozen, deep water. We knew nothing about sensors, and our knowledge about electrical machines and microcontrollers were also very limited. But we had to create to strategy to explore a room and therefore we started with an elongated internet research. We read many dissertations about algorithms for simultaneous localization and mapping of mobile robots. Level algorithms were described, but very often we missed the relations to some hardware components. So in general those detailed documents were mostly unusable for us. Therefore we really had to develop own ideas, strategies and plans to realize this project.

Picture of the final product	Picture of the final product from the top