In our science class we had a set of activities to experience making machines using Lego-blocks to solve problems. The examples are quite interesting and it makes learning fun.
This activities and lesson g and helps us understand more about robots and robotics. Thus, the activities are related to software in which we can gather data and analyze it to have a better understanding of physics and how stuff works in real life.
In this activity we had to measure the distance and velocity of or robotic car by setting the wheels so that the car would go straight and with the help of a ruler determine the distance the wheels traveled and the speed at which our car traveled as well.
The first step was to measure the diameter of the wheel of out car which was 5.5 cm. Once we had the diameter, using a simple formula, we multiply the ratio of the wheel times PIE, and divided by the number of degrees the wheel had turned. Our software gave us the actual rotation in degrees and the number of turns. Given that a complete turn is 360 degrees.
The software also recorded the time it took to travel from point A to point B, which is the base of figuring the velocity of our car.
The more turns, the further the car traveled.
Some of the discrepancies of our experiment is human error. Since we had to use our bare eyes to compare the positioning of the wheel to the ruler.
Another discrepancy could be that in a high velocity, a sudden stop of the car caused the care to bounce back some millimeters or even centimeters because of the friction cause between the rubber wheels and the surface of the table, affecting our data.
Even though we did not have the ideal tools for measuring the distance the car traveled, our data matched pretty close to what the software would show us.
These were our results:
