The project's goal is to build a plotting robot. Along the way, we discovered through simulation that generating the path that a robot must traverse for a given drawing is not obvious. Many interesting geometric and algorithmic problems have been solved, and have been applied to this project. To abstract these algorithms, we have built a paired system connected through a bluetooth network that provides a graphical user interface. This interface allows users to simply draw line segments on the screen as in any conventional drawing program, and then sends a series of commands as a byte stream to the robot. The robot parses these commands until an end of transmission character is received, and then begins plotting. The mechanism for plotting involves a linear actuator that raises a metal hinge attached to a piece of chalk or a pen, which allows full control for where lines are needed.
danlynch