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.