I was captivated during class as we were presented with historical information, a quick introduction to the household names of Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton. Galileo (1564-1642) is most notable and immortalized for his role in the Scientific Revolution, his contributions to astronomy, and as one of the first to experiment with moving objects. His name has been down in history and is considered by many to be the “Father of Modern Science.” Here is the most famous portrait of Galileo.
With Galileo’s death came the birth of Sir Isaac Newton in 1642. Many argue that Sir Isaac Newton is THE greatest scientist of all time. I’m sure that depends on your scale of greatness, into how the term is operationalized, etc etc..but nonetheless his discoveries are used as the basis today of inertia and motion.
Sir Isaac Newton’s law of Inertia: An object will remain at rest or in Uniform motion in a straight line, unless acted on by an external or unbalanced force (contrary to Aristotle, who that the natural state of the object was at rest)
With this information and a few more formulas involving work and force, we applied this newfound knowledge to our Mindstorm robots. Knowing that:
Force = Mass x Acceleration and
Work = Force x Distance (work must equal a change in location) and
Power = Work / Time and
1kg on Earth (force of gravity) = 9.8 N and
understanding the differences in kinetic vs potential energy,
we could apply this in a lab form to test our robots.
We were going to do two different experiments. A pulley system was set up and attached to the robot, with a place to attach weights. The robot, when connect via USB to the computer had the capacity to use force to pull the weight up. Our goal was to see how the acceleration changes (basically how fast the robot pulls up the weight) in two different cases.
1. We would keep a fixed force, but change the mass (using F = m x a)
2. We would keep a fixed mass, while changing the force.
We ran three trials for each test: Fixed force
Power level/force: 75.
Trial 1: Power force 75 = .25 kg (mass) x a
Trial 2: 75 = .23 kg x a
Trial 3. 75 = .19 x a