Over the past two weeks in ‘Contemporary Science and Innovation SCI 184’ we have been working as teams to analyze how the robot, a car made into small lego pieces, functions with the program LabView. Our group always ranges from 3-4 people, depending on the attendance of our initial team but whether or not it is the same members in the group it is easy to continue what we were doing in the previous class due to the instructions and basic understandings of the program.

The robot car has four wheels that have a ‘motor’, which determines how the car is going to run. There are two orange arrows and a yellow ‘play’ button. To connect the robot to the computer, we hooked the USB and attached it to the NXT to the computer and opened LabView.

LabView is a system-design platform and development environment for a visual programing language.

After entering different numbers, we were able to understand the key elements of the car and measure the circumference and the diameters. We were able to program how far or how short we wanted the car to move with the numbers we typed in. We finally disconnected the cord to the robot car and measured how far it could move and aimed at measuring it to 2 feet, in a perfect circle. When completing this we became very excited! The robot experiment allowed me to better understand how cars function via distance and was relevant to our energy and sustainable class.