Finally! we had our first robotics lesson! (sort of)
A few weeks ago, our System Programming lab professor told us he is imparting this extracurricular course on robotics based on Lego Mindstorms, consisting on 3 four hour long lessons in which we had to develop and program some robots to do some automatic tasks, such as making the robot take 12 cans out of a half a meter radius circle, sumo fighting and make the robot follow a line.
And yesterday we started with task 1: can-pushing
It was so much fun! the robots were programmed in NXC (Not eXactly C) using Bricxcc IDE, As the name indicates, it is fairly similar to C and somewhat similar to Java, but thanks to Alex, we had no problem with the programming.
As of the Lego building, we had the instructions and we added some parts to make it more efficient for picking up the cans while maintaining stability and mobility.
The main idea behind our robot was to use a color finder to check if it found the black line (border of the circle) and if so, turn around, then spin for a few seconds using ultrasound in case it found another can nearby, but that did not work so well, so we finally decided to exclude that (would have worked had we given more time). In the end it worked out pretty good I think.
Conclusion: So much fun in an evening I should have spent studying for a test that I had next day, but whatever right?
