Lego Mindstorms

Working with the Lego Mindstorms has been a really great opportunity to have these past two classes. My group had a few troubles getting some of the pieces together in the beginning, (we seemed to have a few things backwards…must’ve been a case of the Mondays.) Once we had everything put together and plugged in, I wasn’t too sure what we would be doing with them, I had never been one for programming, but the software used for the Mindstorms seems to cater to both amateur and advanced users. I will definitely need more time with the program to really get the feel for it, (and maybe a manual too…) but sticking with basic power functions eased my worries.

On the first day with the Mindstorms, we only had time for some basic functions, such as going forwards and backwards, left and right, and speed control. On our second meeting, we learned how to create an entire string of commands and also how to loop it so it can happen more than once. It wasn’t long before our robot began doing our own routine that included a short little musical number throughout the motions.

Later, we calculated the diameter of the tires before measuring the distance traveled by the robot. The wheel circumference was .1700m, and the distance we measured was about 15cm or 16cm. The problem with measuring the robot in this fashion is that you will never have the ruler perfectly at the back or front of the tire. The robot also does not travel in a perfectly straight line, so as it leans, the person doing the measurement leans, so there’s a large margin for error in this situation. We did not repeat this experiment with other power modes, nor did we calculate the number of wheel turns since we then moved onto the next experiment.

Next, we programmed the vehicle to participate in a small challenge to make the robot travel clockwise in a one-meter circle, travel counter-clockwise, do both and make a sound, and then we programmed both tires to opposite directions as our unique trajectory. It was a bit challenging trying to choose speeds for each tire in order to make the robot travel in the one-meter circle. We started a 40 seconds, but then dwindled down to using about 20 seconds for the circle, it was difficult to measure due to the cramped space in the classroom, so if we were to do this again I’d want to pick an open area (where I can also mark off a meter circle on the floor in tape) and make the robot travel the circle. For the tire speeds, the power modes for the first one we chose were 85 for one side and 70 for the other. We then tried power modes of 55 and 40, and then power modes of 65 and 65 for the opposite moving trajectory.

Overall, I did enjoy working with the Mindstorms and hope to do more with them in the future. It is unbelievable the amount of power that these small machines possess! And I know that it’s going to take a lot longer than a few classes to get the hang of the program and learn more of its features, but this class provides a nice sampling to robotics that I probably won’t receive in any other class that I take at Suffolk. (And I think I finally understand why my father, an electrical engineer, gets so excited when he used to talk about working with the Mindstorms when he was in college!) It’s certainly a nice break from textbook readings!