Subject:
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May 22nd 2004 SMART Meeting Notes
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.org.us.smart
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Date:
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Tue, 25 May 2004 04:01:21 GMT
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Viewed:
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1584 times
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At our SMART meeting last Saturday there were a less robots than usual, but the
quality of the robots there was definitely first rate! Gus, Patrick and I
brought Gap Crossing/Cube Gathering mini-challenge robots. All of them attempted
the entire problem, rather than just a part of it. None of them were perfect,
but then the challenge is quite difficult!
Alex brought a pair of robots to show a unique solution to last meeting's
mini-challenge -- two robots that were to exchange a crate. His solution was to
have one robot drive in a big circle, drawing a pair of lines as it went, and
then after a while the other robot would start looking for the lines, when it
found them it would know which direction the other robot was because the two
lines were different colours. Simple line tracking brought the two robots
directly in line with each other, and the crate was exchanged. Not repeatable on
paper, but on a white-board the surface could be wiped. Definitely an
interesting solution!
A unique marble-contraption was also shown, a robot that moved a bunch of
individual marbles around in a do-nothing loop, but that fits in perfectly with
the rest of the crate contraption, since the net effect is the same there:
nothing :-)
I gave a very elementary introduction to using NQC and BricXCC at the meeting.
The slides are available here:
<http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/David/SMART/Presentations/01-may-2004-nqc_intro.ppt>
I'll probably turn this into a series in future meetings.
Then Gus did a 'group programming' exercise to get an adder/subtracter platform
to do simple line tracking. The key take-away for most people was how useful
datalogging can be using NQC!
Finally we had our first real Grand Challenge event -- Shane and I had robots
that were starting to look like they might work, while Gus, Patrick and a few
others gathered arena and ball information for their robots. The next few
meetings should prove quite interesting!
Meeting pictures can be found here:
<http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=84156>
For our next meeting (July 31st) we voted for "Milk Man" as our mini-challenge.
Given a 3/4" black line in a light surface. At certain points on the track will
be 2" long markers, also 3/4" tape, that go right across the line. Build a robot
that will track the line, and at each marker will deposit a 'milk bottle' (stack
of LEGO bricks of your design). If you would like a more challenging version,
pick up any 'empty' bottles already at the marker before depositing 'full' ones.
And if you'd like a simpler version, just get your robot to track the line and
deposit a single bottle at the first marker.
Here's a picture of the arena, though the actual course will not be a simple
oval.
<http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/David/SMART/Samples/Arenas/milkmanarena.gif>
See everyone in July!
--
David Schilling
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