Robotics Blog

As a class last friday we constructed robots out of legos. To make the robot move, we attached a battery pack to it, and connected a cord from the battery to the computer, in order to tell the robot what to do. To experiment with how the robot moves, you have to set the power level and the number of seconds you want to robot to run. To determine the number of wheel turns, the first step was to find the circumference of the wheels.

C=Pi x (Diameter)            1m=100cm

C=3.14 x (5.75m) = 18 =18cm/100cm/1m=0.18m

# of wheel turns=rotation/degrees/360degrees/rotation

total distance= (#turns) x circumference

velocity=distance/time

My group partner and I chose three power levels and three different times for our sets of calculations. We chose 1 second at 75% power,2 seconds at 80% power, and 1 second at 100% power. These were our results:

 

 

Then we took the calculations from the computer:

To find our calculations, we measured the starting point of the robot and the ending point of where the robot was after the test. We measured in cm on a ruler. After the tests, we needed to convert centimeters to meters in order to find the percent error.

Our calculations vs. the computers calculations were a little off so in order to find the percent of the percentage off you need to:

 

%error= distance we measure-distance computer measures (labview)/ Distance we measured + Distance Labview x 100

These were our calculations for % error:

Based on the percent error data taken, our calculations were not too far off from the computers data. Overall, I thought this assignment was fun and affective. Before the lab, I did not know how to calculate a wheels number of rotations and the distance it traveled so I thought it was pretty cool to learn that!