Robotics made easy?

Robotics made easy?

I never thought I would find myself experimenting with robots. Technology and games were never really mt thing, and I left those to my younger brothers to dabble in. But here I was, in Science 184, building a robot, sin lab partner and having a surprisingly good time. After assembling the robot, we were supposed to put him to the test.

Connected through a USB port, the robot was running through a program called “Labview.” Using labview, our task was to run a simple experiment using different amounts of power to measure the distance and the velocity the robot would go, measure his physical distance travelled (therefore finding the velocity) and compare it to the results that Labview found. Once our trials were over, we had to consider the difference in measurements found by us vs. the measurements found on Labview, which are in theory more accurate.

Using the different measurements, we needed to calculate our percentage of error- basically how far off our measurements were compared to Labview’s, the actual distance/velocity.

We had the measure, with a ruler, the starting point of the back wheel of the robot, and then how far the back wheel had moved by the end of the trial. We were measuring the distance between Point A-B.

So here’s can example of the first trial:

Time: 1 Second (how long the robot travelled for)

Power setting (how much power the computer was programmed to give the robot): 75

Distance measured (how far the robot traveled in cm, according to my measurement): .26 cm

Velocity measured (“   “): .26 cm

etc, etc-below, the rest of the results from the trials are graphically illustrated.

My percentage of error on all three of the trials was between 5-6%. But the question is why was there a percentage area at all? There many reasons why the results that I came up with would differentiate from Labview’s. Perhaps each time, when I took the measurement of the starting point, maybe it wasn’t directly on 0, instead more like .5 or 1cm, which ultimately would throw off the data.

Here is the physical representation of the data….

robotics made easy