EduRobot autonomy

[dlavery]

Has anyone started to really exercize the autonomy aspects of the EduRobotics kits yet?

There are a bunch of exercises designed for the EduRobotics kit on the NASA Robotics Education Project Robot Autonomy Activities page. The programming subteam on Team 116 has started to work through several of them, to get some experience with the autonomy capabilities of the kits.

One of the first things we tried was using simple photoresistors as cheap optical sensors, and developing a line-following capability. You can see some of the results here. By adding in two cheap Sharp proximity sensors (do you notice a recurring theme of "cheap" running through many of our posts? ), we also built a version of the mini-robot that maintains a 4-inch standoff distance from any approaching object. You can see a Quicktime movie of it here. Each of these examples took less than one afternoon to program and implement.

What are other teams doing with the kits? Let's see if we can get a good discussion on EduRobot autonomy going! (and maybe share some code?)

-dave