Week 9

            This week Dana and I finished our tablebot and it was a great success! It is very rewarding to have your robot and your program perform without error. When building the tablebot I was frustrated with the software at first, but once I got the hang of it I was having a lot of fun. We are now working on line-runner for the next challenge. On Thursday we started writing the program and by the end of class we got a pretty good start. We first attempted to have the robot measure the time it took to get to the first line, then go back to the beginning and suppress the light sensor for the amount of time recorded in the previous run. This did not work very will so we are now changing our code so the robot counts the number of line encountered.

            I used to believe that even simple robotics, like what we are doing now, was extremely complicated. I learned this week that it is not that complicated and can be done by anyone. I am having a lot of fun using the Lego robots and as a soon as a finish one task, I am excited to start the next one. I am especially looking forward to building the ROV and/or AUV. This is another task that is much less complicated then I had imagined.

            In the future, I think there should be more robot tasks to choose from. This way not everyone is doing the same tasks. This will make for a diverse set of robots and will allow students to watch robots complete more tasks then we currently have

Week 8

            This week Dana and I worked our way through the Lego robot tutorials and then started building the tablebot. The tutorials were very strait forward and didn’t take much time to get through. We started our tablebot with only one light sensor on the front. Our plan was to have the robot drive forward until it detected the edge, back up and turn a random direction and drive forward again. However, we decided it would work much better to have two sensors, one in the front and one in the back. This would make sure we didn’t back off the edge and it would allow us to record twice as many contacts with edge of the table.

            We attempted to write the program today and we were both a bit frustrated with the programming environment. We are having a hard time translating our ideas to code. I am considering adding a third light sensor to the robot as well. This would solve one of the problems we are having. Our robot has three wheels, one in the front and two the back, and the back wheels tend to go off the side of the table. I would position the three sensors so they were just in front or behind each wheel. However, the programming software seems to be the limiting factor. This is because I not sure I will be able to have the robot respond to cues from two sensors simultaneously. In any case we should have the tablebot ready for next week.