Project Orbitron has become the core experience/project of my journey and ended up being the main topic for my college essay.

Upon finishing the project, I participated in a local science fair and presented my work to the Kent Guild, an academic society at my school. I spent another three months developing the algorithm while teaching myself Mathematica and constantly tweaking Orbitron’s settings. Building the prototype alone took the entire summer vacation and over $1,000 in the budget. I have worked on several for-fun projects in Arduino before, but Project Orbitron was by far the largest and most complex one I have ever done. In six months, I built a prototype vehicle and experimentally confirmed that our algorithm successfully processes the driver’s intention conveyed by a SpaceMouse and cooperatively controls all four wheels so that they don’t conflict with each other to accomplish the intended motion.

Red Arrow: actual trajectory of the vehicle As user controls the mouse, arrows’ length will always represent the relative velocity of each wheel.

Pink Arrow: tangent line of the green circle angle between the gray arrow and pink arrow is used to determine each wheel’s angle.

Gray Arrow: acts as base for red/pink arrows always fixed along the vehicle body’s angle.

Blue Arrow: motion of the vehicle’s center.

This can be applied to vehicles with any number of wheels, but just with more curvature circles.

Green Concentric Circles: each represent the radius of curvature of each wheel and the center of the vehicle.

Four labels are shown next to each wheel to display updated angle and speed values. All the arrows shown in this interface are color-coded differently to distinguish each other more effortlessly.

When Mathematica Notebook is executed, the interface on the right is continuously updated based on the user’s input.

Orbitron classic wildstar