September 16th, 2014
Lego Robotics Activity
The Lego robotics activity was very interesting to me. I was mesmerized by the fact that I could build a moving robot out of some Legos and a battery pack. I was a bit confused when we began the activity because it was difficult for me to realize the difference between the different pieces (i.e. the short black sticks that looked similar, but were not the same). After my partner and I figured out the pieces, we finally built it, with only a few little mistakes. Once our robot was up and running and we plugged in the USB cord to the computer, I was amazed! The fact that changing the numbers on the computer would make our robot move faster or slower, for longer or shorter, was unlike any experiment I have done before. I enjoyed changing the time and speed of the robot, because we never knew what the outcome was going to be.
Measuring the robot’s travel with a ruler was slightly different than when the computer measured the robot’s distance. There were only two instances out of nine separate tries that we got the same exact number on the ruler as the number that was on the computer. For our first trial, we set the speed to 38 and made it travel for 2 seconds. The distance on each try varied, and we got 28 centimeters for the first try with the ruler, whereas the computer calculated that it went 28.3 centimeters. On the second try we measured 27.8 centimeters with the ruler, and the computer measured 27.75 centimeters. The final try resulted in 28.1 centimeters with the ruler and 28.15 centimeters with the computer.
On the second trial, my partner and I decided on setting the robot to travel 1.5 seconds at a speed of 42. We had 23.6 centimeters on the ruler for the first try, and 23.3 centimeters on the computer. For our second try, both the ruler and the computer miraculously measured out to be 23.3 centimeters. On our last try for trial three, we measured 23.4 centimeters whereas the computer measured 23.25 centimeters traveled.
The third and final trial had a speed of 60 and 1.2 seconds to travel. We measured 27.4 centimeters for the first try, and the computer measured 27.5 centimeters. On our second try, we measured 27.3 centimeters with the ruler, and the computer measured 27.25 centimeters traveled. On our last try, we once again measured the same distance traveled as the computer at 27.3 centimeters.
Although we were correct two out of the nine tries when measuring the robot’s distance traveled, there was still a percentage of error. I believe this is because the computer had a more precise measurement of the distance traveled, opposed to ourselves who were making the best judgements that we could when measuring. The percent error part confused me a little bit, for the fact that I have always had a more difficult time with math calculations. Our first trial had -1.06% error, the second trial had -.3642% error, and our final trial had .1833% error. This resulted in an overall total of -1.809% error for our experiment.