My Robotics Page.

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Today we started our robotics project. Today we were introduced to the programming we were going to use, aswell as the robot themselves. We were givin intructions from a website, www.nxtprograms.com, to make a "5 minute robot". A simple design that was easy to assemble. But we added on two different sensors to it, the way everyone did it was different, but ours was simply attaching them to arms. Having the touch sensor out farther with the thing we added to the end, it extended its reach so it would not faceplant into the wall it would sense the wall before the rest of the robot smacked into it.


These pictures are of the robot me and my partner built together. After assembling the robot we were introduced to the code, using python he gave us an example of the program that had some of the very basic functions. Like making the screen pop up a mesage to see.


This is a segment of the demo that chris gave us we used this to move our robot around the room a little. Soon after Mr farrel gave us a challenge to make the robot do a square, but it was not as simple as making a turtle do it on the computer. Each engine is different in its own way so we had to make it turn at a specific speed and time to our engine. Doing this we made a code for our robot to do a square.

this code had our robot make a square as it moved, going forward, a right angle turn, forward and repeat untill it made a square and then the robot stopped moving.

Today was the second day of robotics and it was the most fun I have had so far. Today we were given the sensors to use, the touch sensor, and the sonar sensor. The touch sensor does what it implies, it can tell when the button on front is being pushed.

The sonar sensor, looks like a pair of eyes, It can sense it numbered units, the distance between it and what ever is in front of it.

We also did lots of coding that was directly involved with these two sensors. Like moving forward until the touch sensor is pushed, or moving until the sonar sensor sees youare 50cm away from a wall then stop. The code I have was using both. The bot would move forward until the sonar sensor knew that it was under 50 away from the wall. Then it would back up, turn, and start moving again and would repeat the process until the tt touch sensor was hit. When the touch sensor was hit the program and the robot would stop.



This is the new completed robot I finished today, using both sensors with the touch sensor out farther than the sonar.And here is the code i made, using both sensors as I explained before, it will move straight forward until the sonar can tell something is with 50 units, then it backs up turns and keeps doing that program. But if the touch sensor is hit, then both the program and the robot stop.


Today was definenly a fun day, eventhough i did not get my code to work correctly. Today we were introduced to the color sensorr, it could tell what color an object was. The only problem is that it had a very short range. So the idea for the first challenge had to be scrapped because it was to find a red ball and move over to it. but because of the short range it would not work very well. Eventually we got the idea to instead folow a line, ya sounds easy, NOT. just to get the robot to folow a line ended in disaster, sometimes it would go off the line, turn to much, turn to fast, and I did not find the correct code to simply folow the line. One of the main issues I ran into was that the motors would not be going smooth, it was more like 1 went then the other, making it move in a very jagged path. Also I had set my speeds for my turns and my movement very very low to movement 40 and turning 15, it acted like it was on speed 100 swerving very far and not following the line. But today I did learn how to read, and operate the color sensor, and how to get the robot to change its path according to that data.

Today is monday January 27, 2014, and because we did not have a full week of robotics today we finished it. The project that we had today was different, it was on a elevated surface with 3 holes, supposed to be the surface of mars, with 2 areas of blue representing water. I decided to use the sonar for movement on a extended arm facing down. So when it saw the deeper hole it would back up turn a little and keep moving. But no matter what I did eventually it always fell into the hole and I know why. Because of something that happened early on in the robotics week, my bot would move to fast, and would switch between the motors so only one would be on at a time, not both so it would always jerk around and zigzag. I figured it would be an easy fix of simply making the number lower on the speed but, they did not have enough power to move at that slow speed. So I turned to another idea, I have played with gears in the past and I figured ou a way to get more power to the wheel with the motor spinning at full speed, and have the wheel spin slower. I simply made the motor spin a small gear, and that spun a much bigger bear which was attached to the wheel, making it so that with the motor at full power the wheel would spin at a much slower more controllable speed, and it worked.

With that The robot was much easier to use and if I had more time I could perfect it so that the wheels would not angle making the gears touch the ground. I made a crude solution but it did the job well. Thanks to this mod I was able to navigate through the field and easily avoid the ditches.


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