Robot Activity

For the past two classes we have been putting together lego robots and programming them from our computers on a special program called lego mindstorm. Not having all of our pieces to put together our robot was definitely frustrating. The teacher told us to use other similar pieces to compensate which we thought was fine…..until much later when we realized our back wheel was on wrong because of it, but it was fine because it still moved just like everyone else’s. We then plugged two cables from the battery to the wheels of the robot and a usb cable from the battery to the computer. I did not really understand the programming process, probably because I have never used anything like this before, I just followed what Professor Shatz had us do. We dragged a motor from the tools panel to our programming board as well as something for acceleration speed, direction, and length of time. Hitting an arrow at the top of the tools panel bar on the program sends the information to the robot and it moves. We played with the acceleration a little bit to get different distances and speeds, we then measured where the robot started and ended to see the distance that we got. The computer automatically measured the distance so we compared our answers and got the percentage of error. For example the first trial we did, we measured 17.5 cm of distance for the robot. The computer measured 17.4 cm of distance, subtracting the two distances and dividing it by the mean (17.45) will give you the percent of error. For this first trial we got .0057% error. For the second trial we did, the robot traveled 13 cm with the ruler and the computer estimated it traveled 13.15cm. 13.075 was the mean and .01147% was teh percent of error.