This semester I am taking a seminar course on Sustainability Energy and Technology. As part of the Technology portion of this class we have assembled Lego robots that we can program to do simple actions. This week we used these robots to study distance and velocity. My partners and I programed the robot so that the motors that control each wheel operated at equal power for a set amount of time. We then calculated that the circumference of each wheel was (1.728 cm). which helped us understand how far the robot traveled. This allowed us to calculate the velocity of each test, because velocity is distance divided by time. Some of the basic conversion factures we thought about were: 360 degrees is equal to one rotation and one hundred milliseconds is equal to one second, and how distance is related to the number of turns. We did three tests, each test we set the power of the motor to a different degree, and recorded our observations. Below is the data we collected:
1) number of wheel turns: 1.605
theoretical distance: .2772m % error 1st experiment (power 75) = .0834 = 8.3% actual distance .255m
2) number of wheel turns: 1.74
theoretical distance: .300 % error (power 80) = .0869 = 8.7%
actual distance: .275
3) number of wheel turns: 1.966
theoretical value: .339 % error (power 90) = .08455 = 8.5%
actual distance: ..3115
As you can see there is some experimental error in our tests. This error could have been caused by an the table not being level, the wheels skidding, or lack of precision in our measurement of the distance that the robot traveled.