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SSSP
Summer 2001
Ileana Streinu
Mihaela Malita

Morning

• Building strong Lego structures. Use the handout for ideas on building stronger structures, combining wheels and gears,
• Forces, torque and gears - a short tutorial.
• Using the resources for ideas on building bumpers, various mechanisms (such as a walking mechanism), using the sensors. Resources include:
  • Handout: "The art of Lego Design"
  • Constructopedia
  • Web resources: the Mindstorms site, etc.
• For about one hour or so, experiment with building some of the small projects from the handout (e.g. a gear train and a beam-reinforcer for the robot you built on Wednesday).
• Construct a mobile robot using any design you want, but
  • make it sturdier with beam reinforcement.
  • any ideas for making it more stable?
  • add to it a bumper (from book, or web resources, or your imagination).

Afternoon

• Each team should take a picture of their morning robot with beam reinforcement and bumper.
• Program the morning robot for the following tasks, to be performed in the hallway:
  • move straight from door to first wall and stop.
  • move straight from door until bumping into a wall, then stop.
  • move straight from door until bumping into a wall, then turn left.
  • move straight from door until bumping into the first wall, then turn right.
• Adapt the speed of the robot built in the morning to make it easy to perform the tasks listed above, using one of the following two methods, or both, or any new one you might think of (let me know about it!):
  • turn the power down in the controlling program.
  • gear reduction
• Go to the Fire-fighting robot contest web site to learn more about similar projects.
• To do, by the end of the day:
  • Finish lab report, as a web page linked from your main web page. It should include at least one picture of today's robot(s), and a description of what you have done today (emphasize your contributions, or say that it is following the steps from the book).

Page last updated July 20, 2001