The Goal for this Summer

Our overall goal for the VelcroSat club is to be able to make a constellation of cube satellites to be able to de-orbit space debris. In the constellation of pico satellites, there would be a master satellite, and many slaves, that will work together in a joint effort for sensing and locating space debris. The questions that we have are; how are we going to sense, move towards or collide with, capture and de-orbit the debris.

Due to the complexity of this task, the club decided to move toward the research of space debris tracking, instead of capture. To be able to accomplish this underlying goal we have decided to complete a sub project, make a group robots to be able to sense, an object like a ball ruling passed them, and then follow that ball. With this project we would try to implement the master and slave concept, with the master engaging its slaves when is senses an object in a specific zone. 

The steps that we would like to follow are below:

-Rotational PIR scanner, to scan its environment for moving objects

-When object triggers PIR, use sonar and get position of object

-From 2 or more positions, determine trajectory of object

-Move robot to intercept object based on trajectory.

(We will do these steps first, before implementing the following of the object)

Later we'd like to move to active ranging, similar to http://www.acroname.com/robotics/info/articles/sharp/sharp.html, but for now the above lets us begin to work with the needed sensors and math.