RoboCup Team Name

Photo by duane.schoon

The team's name is 'Lightning Squad'! Thanks to Jake for his great suggestion! Sounds good alongside the robot's name - Zeus - decided by the group on Thursday.

Team Meeting 6

Today the RoboCup Team worked on the Robocup line following program. We have new photocopies of the RoboCup Rescue tiles to practise on. The four of us worked in pairs, Jake and I pairing up while Jasmine and Oliver experimented on Oliver’s line following idea. While Oliver and Jasmine tested their program, Jake and I tried a variation of my line following test. We found that it is possible to follow the line for the Robocup with only one color sensor, provided it turns left when it sees black, and right when it sees white. Both our experiments were a success, with Oliver’s a little more reliable. Our next challenge is to save the “victim”.:-)

Meanwhile, the rest of the Robotics Team continued work on Annette's challenge on the FLL mat, to get the Robot across to the line, to stop, turn and follow the line a certain distance. Annabelle is close to success with this!

By Freddie

Team Meeting 5

Wednesday at school

6 July Summary of learning

Oliver - using the light sensor, not the colour sensor to detect silver because i fu use the color sensor it'll detect the silver as either black or white because it doesn't have silver in its list of colours to detect

Jake - 39 or 40% to detect silver using light sensor - using ambient light. Oliver - problem with this, may need to update robot's firmware.

Alice - Don't have everything on C motor because the robot will go in only one direction.

Annabel - Nothing can be a failure - it's all learning (thanks Simon!).

Freddie - keep programs as simple as possible.

Jake - Be careful what you press on the robot.

Caitlyn - It's hard to use both colour and light sensors.

Jasmine - Colour doesn't have to always be in port 1 - default port is 3.

Ethan - There's no such thing as a silver colour - the word calibration - polling?

Team Meeting 4

With Claire and Tom Horncastle.

We have to make a robot able to square itself on a wall - it can do this if it is built solid enough.
Following along wall - note wheels on side of robot so it rolls smoothly.
No wheels needed on back of robot - just stabilizers.
The teams are building the robot on cover of one of our books.
There are all kind of program that you put on the robot.
You can put as many attachments on at the start of FLL as you can.You can take thing off if you are in base.take off as you work through the challenges and you don't need them any more.

Need someone in the team to be responsible for tyre-checking because they come loose.

Line following example shown with one of Claire's robots - it had too much side to side zig zag and too fast.

Using one light sensor - going slower but more carefully - smoother, less zigzag. Better.

Watch wheel friction, Robot might slip on different papers/boards.
Important to have robot able to recognize colour Green.
Robocup - green is always on left - turn 90 degrees left.
Robot follows edge of line, not the line itself. Follow left side of any line.

Small wheel on back of our robot - you never know which way it's going to go - but great for Robocup line following - really good for going forwards, not good if you need your robot to go backwards.

Tom's advice - friction is your worst enemy. Wheel type you choose can overcome this. Watch different friction on different mats.
Advantage of big wheels - can go faster, it goes further in one rotation - put a red mark on the wheel to see what one motor rotation distance is. The motor is what determines what the axel turn will be.
A rotation is NOT a turn of a wheel, it is a turn of the motor.
Disadvantage of bigger wheels - narrow ones can zig zag too much -
Smaller wheels are not so fast
Balloon wheels wobble more, not so flat. Flat surface wheel good.

This year's FLL mat will be a fold-up mat with lots of pieces on it.
Colour sensor needs to be fitted in front of the wheels!
Keep light sensor really low so it doesn't pick up outside light or its own shadow.

Always use a stop block to finish - great to use when testing programmes. Is different than a wait block. It's in the common pallette.
Always use B and C motors for moving the robot - use A for attachments. B and C are the default for motors, so use these defaults and that's one less thing to think about. Keep all sensors in their default ports too. We need to check what these are.
Light sensor goes to port 3.

Switch - positive top, negative bottom.

A single light sensor is enough for line following.
Line following - make go forever, not 1 rotation.

Students welcome to email Claire and attach programs for checking.

By Caitlyn and Carol

2009 NZ Champion FLL Robot

2009 NZ Champion Robot

The robot that a lot of US teams are apparently making - we have the book to create this from.
Check out how it is designed, and where the sensores are. Touch sensors at each end, too.

No wheels on the back.

Trying out the line following and detecting green on the Test Mat.

Lucky to have lots of robots to test the programmes on.

Claire and Tom helping us out and guiding the programming by asking questions.

Team Meeting 3

Today we got useful information from Oliver.

• One Rotation = 170 mm or 17cm
• The color sensor has a light sensor mode. We are going to see if the light sensor works with it.
• Last of all data logs and data will tell you about what happened with the color sensor.

• We had to be precise where we put the robot in the base.
• Download it and find out what your color sensor was doing.

Also we printed off green tiles to help us practise with for the rescue mission.

By Jasmine

Team Meeting 2

Image by doryexmachina

Today, after school, we finally got our robot following a black line. We worked in pairs to try the line following programme suggested in The Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 Discovery Book. It still didn't really work. It used the colour sensor. We think we finally succeeded because we switched back to the Light Sensor and also fitted the sensor to the middle of the robot. We tested the robot on the line following paper and it was great. One corner was too sharp, so we still have to work out what to do there.

Claire couldn't come to help us today, but we were lucky to have Annette come along in her place. Annette kindly brought her school's two robots so it was good to have more robots to work with than our usual one. They have names, and different personalities and work in different ways. One had the ultrasonic sensor for eyes. But apparently the ultrasonic sensor is quite hard to use.

Click to see a larger image.

Annette explained the 2010 Body Forward FLL mat and the sorts of things our robot would have to do - pushing, dropping, line following etc. There are many different ways of doing the challenges. Some challenges were more important than others (eg one you have to beat another team on the other board - the patent and mechanical hand). She said it was important to have more than one person able to do everything in case someone was sick or injured at the competition. Annette challenged us to programme the robot to do this - go out from the start, stop at the black line, follow the line, turn and then move to the challenge. She suggested we break this challenge into smaller parts - try each one on a separate tab, then put them together as one programme.

After half an hour, working in pairs, most of us were still trying to work out how many turns it took to get the robot to the line. Some robots were too fast and passed over the line too quickly to see it. A couple of us got the robot to stop on the line and turn right.

• We will have to measure exactly how far the rotations to go.
• We think Move blocks are different than Motor blocks.
• We need to be more precise in where we place our robot at the start.
• We might need to slow down our robot so it has time to detect a black line.
• No part of the robot is allowed outside the starting area at the start - imagine a glass wall all around it.
  

Annette also explained why we needed to be careful to:

• Pick up the robot when it was running and then turn it off, and not to try and stop it on the board while the motor was running.
• Pull out and put in the USB cable so it doesn't damage the connection on the robot's motor.
• Get the number of rotations we want by re-setting them to 1 first.
• Check which cables are plugged in to sensors and motors and this is correct on our programme.
  

Today was a competition to see which pair could get the first challenge done. But we will have to remember to share our learning with each other too, for the benefit of the team. We will also try working with different people each week as this is very important for the team to work well.

And no, we won't be trying the drop test!

Team Meeting 1

This was our first meeting. We all handed in our permission forms and heard about when we will be meeting and who will be helping us.

We are still struggling with our line following. Liz found us a huge roll of paper and Carol had some black tape that we put on the paper to use for practising our line following.

We had a lot of fun working in pairs to try out the Detect Sound challenge. We had to watch how much sound was in the background. We got it working quite well.