Robots! – Project #2

Isn’t it wonderful? Our ability to tell robots what to do that is. Unlike humans, robots don’t argue with you or say “no”… at least not yet. They do however look at you questioningly and wonder what in the world you are saying. It’s difficult speaking their language, but I’m starting to get the hang of it. Today, I mastered the infamous circle. That’s right. I condemned by little robot friend to a battery’s life of circling. The real experiment though was in comparing my own efforts against a program’s. Here’s what happened.

To start, I cheated. I used a program to communicate with my robot since I could not speak to him without a translator. Lucky for me I was provided with a detailed map as well so it was relatively easy. I just had to provide some numbers to the program such as the circumference of the robot’s wheel, c=0.17, and a time period, t=1 second. The rest was easy.

Of cours now I should probably tell you about the “rest”. The project was to measure how far the robot traveled over a certain period of time, 1 second, and compare that measurement to the program’s measurement. This way I would be able to know if my translator was any good. For the first attempt I set the robot’s motors to 75%. The distance I measured was d=.28. The program measured d=.27 with the wheel rotating 1.59 times. I was off by a fractional error of 0.04, or 4%. The second time, I confess, was a little worse. With the motors set at 50%, I measured a distance of d=.18 while the program measured d=.17, the wheel rotating 1.002 times. The fractional error this time was 6%. The third time was the charm thought. Setting the motors at full power, I measured a distance of d=.39 and the programed measured d=.38, the wheel turning 2.26 times! The fractional error was a meager 3%! My conclusion, when measuring a small distance I might not have what it takes to stand up to the program, but over larger distances the error decreases .

Well, that was my robot adventure.  I’ll be sure to let you know how the next one goes!