Subject:
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June 25th 2005 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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Thu, 30 Jun 2005 16:35:30 GMT
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Viewed:
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3011 times
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At Saturday's SMART meeting we had quite a number of interesting solutions for
the mini-challenge: step ladder traversal. With one exception, most of the
solutions attempted to climb the ladder the way a person would, on the outside.
There were a number of solutions that relied on arms that grabbed one rung at a
time. One person had a robot that attempted to swing a hook up to grab the next
rung, and one person investigated the possibility of using a chain to "roll" up
the ladder. Some other ideas were to have parallel arms rotating together, and
to have a ratcheting mechanism that climbed 1/3 of a rung at a time.
It was a very difficult challenge. The only completely successful solution
(though I'm sure a couple more would have been more successful had the builders
spent more time tuning their robots, or built a more complete arena at home) was
Gus Jansson's robot that traversed the *inside* of the ladder instead of the
outside. It had a middle arm that lifted, and a pair of outside arms that
balanced and held the robot. A clever bit of balancing was required to move past
the top rung. Very nice!
Pictures are at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=134862
Next meeting, July 30, we'll have a game: two teams will build robots that clear
a black rectangle of small cylinders. Teams will build the robots with parts
provided, but I will need at least two people to being laptops with IR towers,
and their favourite programming environments.
By the way, the LEGO store in Belle Square has some new Technic sets: 8416 is a
nice new forklift, 8421 is the gigantic new crane, and 8420 is a red motorcycle.
Also, I mentioned a good pneumatic set to someone at the meeting. That was set
8455 and is unfortunately no longer available.
--
David Schilling
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