Class+no+2

During our second lesson of robotics we were assigned a group and each group was given a different robot for which we were supposed to find and be able to describe its characteristics and describe any possible functions. My group was made up of Nadia, Ottavia and Pietro. This was a reasonable arrangement. We were given a robot that we almost immediately nick-named ‘The Bug’ because it had legs and antennae that made it look a lot like a bug. It took us quite a while to understand all of ‘The Bug’s’ characteristics. First, we found out that we had to turn it on by pressing a button (it was actually more like a very small switch), and that this robot was battery powered. The switch was located in the bottom corner of ‘The Bug’s’ ‘body’ behind one of the anterior ‘legs’. Also, when we first turned it on there were several minor injuries because if your fingers or your hand were in the way of the moving legs you had the possibility of getting hurt if you weren’t holding the robot right. We also noticed that there was a brief interval between the time that you turned the switch and when the legs started moving (we discovered the reason for this later on). We noticed that it didn’t have any sensors that helped it change direction if it were in the proximity of another object or if it had just hit it. We also realized that one of the legs wasn’t functioning particularly well. The two ‘sets of legs’ are powered by two separate motors.
 * //Lesson 2 – 1 October 2010//**

We were then very fortunate, because one of the groups near us was experimenting with the light, and was trying to figure out whether or not their robot was sensible to the light. At this moment, when the lights were turned off, the robot stopped moving, and as soon as the lights came back on again then it started moving its legs backwards and forwards again. We probably would never have thought about this unless the other group had thought about it first. We figured out that the ‘antenna’ were the light sensors, and if you blocked the light from one ‘antenna’, then the ‘legs’ on that side would stop moving, while the other side would keep working. This made us recall the fact that it took it a couple of seconds to start moving the legs after we had turned ‘The Bug’ on. We understood that this was because the sensors had to ‘see’ whether or not there was light, and then ‘report’ this back to the chips that were on ‘The Bug’s ‘ back and then to the battery, and then to the motors. All of this required a couple of seconds to process. We then started suggesting various possible functions for ‘The Bug’. One of these was that it could be a rover, although it would have needed more stable legs because the ones that it had weren’t very stable. Another suggestion was that it be a fully immersed nature camera that could record the moving and habits of various animals. Another possibility (quite funny in my opinion) was that it be a miner detector, to detect mines, even though it would need a way to detect them. We agreed that overall though, if one could add a camera and a way to control it that it could do hundreds of things. After all this we presented our robots with their nick-names. The nick-names were : Phil, No Name, Lamp, Blue Robot, Long Legs, and BR (Balance Robot). All of these robots were extremely interesting, and some had some very peculiar characteristics which were very surprising and very fascinating. Comparing the robots that we studied in class to a living organism is a difficult process. The robots that we studied in class had set ‘jobs’, some of the ‘smarter’ robots could change jobs, or have an extra one added, but there always had to be a human that told it to do it (for example, Victor deleted all of the imputed data that told the BR what to do). These robots could probably be compared to a baby animal, that has to be taught what to do and how to do it by the mother first, yet some things come on instinct because they have been passed down through its genes. So they are similar because they both have to be ‘taught’ but they are different because one has to be given an order to follow it, while the other can also act on instinct, not just on what its taught.