The Robotics Experience

I think that the most fun part of the robotics class is putting together the robot itself. it is just extremely fin to know that there is a myriad of ways in which we can make the robot do or act in a certain way. I think its the whole making something that works that makes it all so fun and using your imagination to make stuff.

The other interesting and sometimes puzzling part of robotics is the programming. this is fun because there are so many diffrent things you can make the robot do and it oppens up a lot of creative things you can do with it. i remember once that my partner and I even made a song using the sound block that could be used. but it is also hard because every single movement has to be programmed and at times it is kind of difficult to figure out what blocks need to be put in. I think the hardest part about it is that you have to imagine in your head what the robot should be doing and using the right blocks to accomplish a certain type of movement.

i think it is quite cool how there are so many diffrent sensors. be cause there are many diffrent sensor there are so many things that you can do with the robot. there are really no real restrictions to what you can do with the sensors or where you can put the sensors you only need to be creative in the programing.

so to conclude i dont think this class has really expanded my knoledge of math and science although math and science is definately applied it mostly simple and basic math and science concepts that are applied. but this classs has expanded my knoledge about technology. i understand now why it is so hard to develope robots that can walk or talk or anylyzes things. it is hard because every single thing that the robot does needs to be programmed. there are so many diffrent ways that we had to colaborate with oher people in this class because it takes a lot of communication and theorizing to get your ideas heard and understood and to decide whether it should be applied or not. it also takes more than one person to be eficient in making the robot and programming it.

Challenge: Drag Race

We had big ambitions on this one just like the last obstacle course and that proved once again to be our downfall. we tried to create a complicated gear system that was very crude and very unstable which made us have to recreate the whole gear system over almost three times until we decided to go with a gear system of only two gears. The driving being the largest gear we could find and the driven being the smallest we could find and that did the trick extremely well. now our problem is that the front swivel wheel is touching the bottom of the robot and that still needs to be fixed.

Building Strategies (chapter 6)

this chapter is basically all about making it easier for us to create our robot by giving us things like ways to link bars together how to configure gears together and ways of positioning the NXT so that weight is distributed evenly. Some structural tips that can be found in this chapter is using studless lego pieces to mak the structure of the robot strong and reliable. there are also modules that could be used with diffrent types of robots so that you only have to make it once and it has many diffrent uses. this chapter has really fiven me a heads up to what should be done or rather what is easier to do than taking a longer harder and less stable way.

classic projects(chapter 14)

This chapter is mostly about inspiring into us some ideas for our own robots by showing us the many different types of sample creations that can be done. the first one was exploring your room and this is basically about trying many different ways to get your robot to maneuver through your room such as detecting edges or corners of the room or what to do when it bumps into things or rather how to make the robot know it bumped into something. The other classic project was following the line which we actually did already in class and i was supprised to find out that there were two ways of doing it. the obvious way is to just stick it on to the robot itself and the other is to actually make the light sensor steer he way which i though was interesting and way more fun.

Gears(chapter 2)

This chapter looked deeper into the "world" of gears and went into depth of the different types of gears and also went more in depth with the different types of gear ratios there are and what types would be good for what types of things. one thing they explored were pulleys and what types of ratios are associated with pulleys and what ratios are for what type of pulleys. This chapter was also about the different types of gears are available for lego. with this chapter i get even more sense that gears are very essential things in building and moving a robot or any type of machinery really.

Get in Gear Investigation

This lab was, as stated in it's tittle, having to do with gears and what what types of gears do what kind of things. such as if you make the driving gear bigger than the driven gear the wheels will go faster because it takes the driving gear a very small turn to turn the driven wheel once. or if you make the driving gear smaller than the driven gear the wheels will move slower because it takes the driving gear a few full turns or one full turn to move the driven wheel all the way around or only a fraction. so this was what this investigation was basically about. it was quite interesting watching it happen and getting the realization that gears are very important.

Obstacle Course Results/Conclusion

we are happy to conclude that our obstacle course robot was a complete success and we made it through the whole course exctly as we planned it should. we got all the points possible and that was very very good for us. but ther were slight flaws to it though. it turns out that the treads did not go absolutely straight so as it moved it veered off slightly. even though that happend we still made it to the finish line without any hitches. so i think that we did pretty good in this obstacle course challenge. we even got the shooter to actually shoot the can so that was quite exilarating.

Building the Course Robot

For the progamming of the robot all of the blocks are pretty much in place. we have already put we have put in all of the blocks in and done the calculations. we had a huge problem with the light sensor though because even though the program is in place the light sensor would not go on. no matter what we did, checked the wires check the NXT check the programming change the light sensor nothing worked. so we came to the conclusion that it was the NXT that was at fault so we changed the NXT. but the NXT that we used was out of battery and since we already put it on we had to take it appart and put in another NXT which work. so we used that one because the light sensor came on. at first we thought we were going to make our own original robot but since it was to complicated we remade the task bot with a few touches of our own. we added an extra motor on top of a flat NXT. we builed a structure at the tip of the task bot to put our sound sensor our touch sensor and our shooter. we put a bar in the middle of the shooter connected to the third motor so that when the ultrasonic sensed the cans at 10cm it would make the motor turn up and trigger the shooter. we also connected two bars from the structure up front to the NXT for extra support. at first we used the standard task bot wheels. but then we changed to the thin carriage like wheels but we found that they were not going straight so we decided to use treads instead. and they worked perfectly. they were exactly straight. since there is no actual wheel size we experimented by trial and error to find the turning degrees. with that we were finished with the programming and were ready for actually doint the obstacle course official run.

Obstacle Course Challenge

This obstacle course is gonna be a tough challenge because this is the first time that we have synchronized all of the sensors and the challenge mostly is writing the program that works. There are so many blocks that need to be used in this challenge that i've only covered a few. but i have also thought about ways that could make this challenge more interesting. one such idea is when the robot is in the square there might be a way to put in some funny sounds and also when the robot hits the wall maybe and OUCH!!! I think this challenge will definately be a fun, crazy and confusing challenge.

chapter 1 summary

Well this chapter is basically talking about proportions of the blocks and how to measure certain blocks. The cubes are looked at studs up and that is the orientation. There are basically three dimensions to the cubes the height being the from bottom to top, the width the shorter of the two proportions and the length being the longer of the two proportions. the ration for the height and the vertical measurement is 6:5 and if 4 cubes are put together the area would be 600. this chapter also talks about the Pythagorean theorem. this theorem states that the base A squared added by the height B squared equals the hypotenuse C squared. so say you have a=3 b=4 and c=4 this will not work because 3 squared plus 4 squared equals 25 and 4 squared equals 16. This chapter also talks about stud less beams which were invented by LEGO to reach and older audience. It also talks about how to use the stud less blocks to make a structure strong and light and the way to do that is to make a chassis which is basically a small beam that holds the corners together.

Finding the field of view

What we were trying to do with this experiment was find out what were the limits of which the sound sensor can sense. So we started out by first finding the furthest distance(in a straight line) that the sensor can sense. we used a white board eraser to accomplish this. then we marked that line with tape and measured the distance. ours was around110cm. the every 10cm we marked a line on the tape and then we put the whiteboard eraser at the 10cm mark and marked how far out the sensor can sense the eraser. we did this every 10cm left and right. what we found was quite interesting. it seems that when it is closest(so around 10 to 30 cm) the sensor cannot sense that wide, maybe about 2 to 5 cm. but when the eraser is at the middle distance(around 40 to 70) the sensor starts to be able to sense wider. although it isnt always perfect there is that pattern. and then when we put the eraser at its furthest the sensor again goes back to picking up hardly anything. so from this experiment my teammates and i have concluded that the ultrasonic sensor works the best in the ranges of 40 to 70 cm.