1/12 Scale Team Introduction

Team members
 Henry Xie - Team Lead

Track and Rail
David Sales - Track Team Lead
Kenny Strickland - Track Team Member - Superway Project Tresurer
Ali Bootwala - Track Team Member

Controls
Nasrat Haidari - Controls Team Lead
Thomas Nguyen - Controls Team Member
Kenny Anagon - Controls Team Member

Cart and Pod
David Chen - Cart Team Lead
Byran Ho - Cart Team member

Project Scope
Our sub-team within the Spartan Superway Project is responsible with the development, advancement, and production of the small scale Superway model. Our goal this semester is to build on last years teams progress by expanding the track to a larger size and developing a controls system which will allow us to run multiple carts on the scale model. This model will also be used to demonstrate the use of the Superway system and its potential in the future. The Superway project is meant to create a automated public transportation system that can take you where ever you need to go without making several other time consuming stops. 

This year our team plans to expand the small scale model by making it a modular design such that parts of the track can be removed and replaced easily without additional modifications to the track. This will also be easier to model in a controls system since it can be modeled as a grid. This grid system can then be modified by like a train simulator game where parts can be removed and replace depending on that block location's needs. 

The carts team will be responsible for building more carts and modifying the electronics a bit to incorporate a WiFi module rather than a Bluetooth XBee module for ease of use and the number of units a single WiFi router can support. We would also like to perhaps research and design a new bogey system which more closely resembles the intermediate scales bogey. If that is not possible then a more reliable one should be designed as well. One problem of the previous semester's bogey was that it got caught on kinks in the rail system. Since our new track design will be a modular design we will still inevitably have these imperfections in our track and thus need slight modifications to improve reliability. Bogey modifications will also need to incorporate the possibility of traveling on inclines at stations to simulate a cart coming down to a station to pick people up.

The controls team will have the greatest task of all and that is to design a sensing system for the carts to avoid collisions with each other and other objects. They also have the task of creating the first prototype for the controls system that tells the carts where to go and the route they should take. One function we would also like to add is a user interface using an app to call for a cart to take you to another location. These are just a few of the tasks the controls team will have to work on. Since this is the largest part of the small scale project everyone will be working with or on some parts of the controls system.