The other day, my group members and I constructed the robot lab.  It is a fairly simple lab in which you put together a lego robot.  First, we had to put together the lego part of the robot which took us a little longer than everyone else.  We didn’t realize we were looking at the wrong instructions so that put us behind right away.  Once we got the right directions, we had one minor mishap but pulled it together.  The reason we had trouble putting the legos together was because some of the parts look the same on the screen.  For example, you couldn’t really tell the difference between the black and grey lego pieces on the computer screen.  Once we figured it all out we completed the building part of the exercise.

Once the robot was built, we had to connect wires from the battery of the robot to the robot itself.  This gave the robot power so we could run some tests.  In order to run these tests the last thing we needed to do was connect a usb cord from the robot to the computer.  By doing this we were able to control the robot and the way it acts.

The last step of the exercise was to calculate 3 different levels of power and average them together to figure our percentage of error.  First we ran the robot for 1.5 seconds with 75% power.  Our measurement was that the robot went .9 meters and the computers measurement was .886527m which came out to be a 1.3473% error.  Secondly, we ran the robot for 1.5 seconds with 50% power.  Our measurement was .57m and the computers was .557917m which came out to be a 1.2083% error.  Lastly, we ran the robot for 1.5 seconds with 25% power.  Our measurement was that the robot went .24m and the computer said it went .232665m which came out to be a .7335% error.

Summing it all up, our average percent error was 1.09636% error.  This number should be as close to 1 as possible so we didn’t do too bad.  It would have been nice to get it a little closer to 1 but we gave it our best.  I enjoyed the lab very much and look forward to the next one.