Subject:
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One last Robolab comment
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Sat, 19 Mar 2005 03:14:50 GMT
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Viewed:
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1171 times
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I think I’ve done about as much commenting about Robolab as is allowed by any
one individual so after this post I promise I’ll be quiet.
First off, I got a very nice email from Dr Chris Rogers in which he explained
some things about Robolab to me that I did not already know. He told me, for
example, that you can define enumerations and use them instead of numeric
constants. That’s a very good thing. He also reminded me that if you don’t
like the way Robolab does things you can always write your own VIs and use them
instead. That is also a nice feature.
I spent many hours today going over two CMU tutorials that LEGO sells on their
website which talk in some detail about programming in Robolab. I’m referring
to the Robotics Explorer (Series One) and the Robotics Educator CDROMs. I also
download the 303 page Robolab reference guide and looked through it at great
length. There certainly are a lot of icons for young kids to learn about. I
was troubled somewhat by how very similar (and rather non-descript) the images
on the icons were. Thank goodness for the popup context-sensitive help
available within the GUI. Hopefully nobody will ever need to decypher them all
without it (like I’ve been trying to do while looking at images on the
internet).
Anyway, in the tutorials I came across two prime examples of a core problem in
Robolab. Here’s the text of the assignment for the first image:
4. If the light sensor is over the white paper, then if the touch sensor is
pressed in, turn on motor A in the forward direction, otherwise turn on motor A
in the reverse direction. Else, if the light sensor is over the black paper,
then if the touch sensor is pressed in, turn on motor C in the forward
direction, otherwise turn on motor C in the reverse direction. For all
conditions, the motor should run for 4 seconds, then stop. (Hint: You’ll need 3
fork merges).
and then there’s this image (with text embedded in the image itself).
Sure, people write buggy code in text-based languages every day. But these
sorts of bugs are far more likely to occur in a graphic programming environment
than in a text-based one.
John Hansen
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