The main chassis has been assembled and the motors have been mounted. The previously completed motor control program has been applied to the completed robot allowing the robot to drive forward and stop when it sees an asparagus spear.
A challenge with the motor control is that the original motor driver was limiting the current of the motor which limited the torque so that the robot could not move. The motor driver acquired from the MESS had a current output limited to 0.6 A while the drive motors were each drawing 6 A under load. A new motor driver board was acquired that can supply 30 A to the motors. This motor board has no data sheets, but after careful investigation and experimentation the driver was correctly wired . Additionally, this new motor driver does not use any pre-existing Arduino libraries so the new control program writes to the Arduinos GPIO pins directly.
A demonstration of the motor control system is shown in the video below. The robot drives at its top speed until it sees an asparagus spear and then slows down to a stop so that it is aligned with the spear.
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