Robotics+Class+5

22nd October 2010.

This week we were programming our robots. We kept in the same groups as last time, but those groups were divided in two – I was with Ottavia, whilst Nadia and Madi stayed together. We also got a new group member, Sarah, who was absent the last lesson. We were using a computer. Mr. Emanuele installed the program for the orbot on each computer. Our task was to program the robot to do different tasks. At first, we found it confusing and could not figure out what to do, but after another explanation from Mr. Emanuele we got it right. We had to drag the ‘motion’ icons to the page, and then modify the task. The robot had two motors – B and C. Our first task was to make the robot make a square. For that, we had to program both motors (wheels) to go forward for a certain amount of time, which in our case was two seconds. Then, we had to make one of the motors rotate 90 degrees, whilst the other motor was still. We had to loop those two actions and set it to four times, so that the robot would complete the tasks four times. We had some difficulty with the rotation, because we could not set the degrees, so we had to guess the number (which came out to be 1.2). Our next task was to make the robot go the distance of one 1 meter. This was more difficult because we could not set it to complete a certain distance. We took the diameter of the wheel, calculated the circumference, divided a meter by the circumference, and got the number of rotations the wheel had to complete to go 1 meter. The next task was to make the robot switch directions at sound, for which we had to program the microphone of the robot. The final assignment was to make the robot stop when its vision was blocked. We achieved this by programming it to continue to go forward until the lights went out, and then stop.