Jun 27, 2012

Week 3: Day 13

Out in the morning - sick child.  Liz worked on our presentation and we were given more specifics for the presentation on Friday.  So this afternoon, we were researching several websites that aid us in defining our Garcia Robot here at UNT as well as how what we learn here will translate into our classrooms.  All of this research will be presented on Friday. 

Week 3: Day 12

We spent the morning working on our lesson plan, filling in some details and identifying corresponding TEKS.  We also worked on the midterm presentation.

Jun 26, 2012

Week 3: Day 11

June 26, 2012

Liz and I looked at more research regarding RF transeivers.  We continued to document our research and started building our presentation for Friday.  We also continued our lesson plans while building our literature review to be used for our final paper.

We built two NXT “Explorer” robots and programs.  The robots randomly search an area and detect and avoid obstacles.  It utilizes two different sensors.  One is ultrasonic and one is touch.  If either sensor determines that the robot is at the end of its current path, the robot stops, looks for the most open path and turns in that direction to continued its most unencumbered movement.  To test them, we had a “battle bot” between them to see which would “win”.  In a confined environment, they will periodically cross paths and have to avoid each other.  On less frequent occasions, they run into each other and avoid each other.  Even less frequently, they run into each and get stuck.  

Aside from the randomness of the search patterns (which cannot easily be controlled with them at this time), the operation was a great deal of fun!!!




Jun 25, 2012

Week 2: Day 10

June 22, 2012

I tried to get the NXT working - there are continued battery issue (we don't have any).  Jennifer found some rechargeable batteries and a charger for the battery pack.  I plugged all of them in to charge them.

I finally figured out some basic programming for the NXT's.  I wrote a simple program.  When the battery pack had some charge, I tried to download it to the NXT.  The driver for them needs to be installed, however, so I was unsuccessful (I do not have the permissions to install the driver).  Instead, I used the NXT directly with some of the basic commands to drive the robot around a little bit.

I also spoke with Eduardo about the programming.  There is an issue with the distance traveled down the hallway.  The robot cannot treat the distances independently.  Therefore, if an obstacle is encountered, the robot would not make it to the end of the hall (the total distance would remain the same).  As a result, we are going to try to treat the entire path down the hall as a variable.  If a turn is made, the total distance will increased and the robot will travel down the hallway until the total distance is reached.