Intro – This challenge is modeled after the atlas stone challenge that is a competetion at the Strong Man World Championship. The task is to follow a line and transport 3 weights back to the same spot. The bigger challenge however is coding your robot to go each of the different 3 ways at the fork and not go back the same way.
Day 1 – Today we started building our robot. We used the template to start but realized we needed two light sensors in order to see a double black line. We were attempting to modify the robot without making it unstable but ran out of time to finish.
Day 2 – The next day we needed to add a 3rd motor in order to lift the weight up and put it down on the platform. We didn’t have enough space on the top so we had to put it in the back and have the string go over the robot on top of two beams.
Day 3 – After finishing our robot we realized the shape of it didn’t work out because the wires couldn’t get through to the ports they were suppose to go to and some ports were blocked by motors. We modified it and then started to code for the figure 8 portion of the challenge.
Day 4 – We finished the figure 8 and started to apply our line following code in order to complete the atlas stone challenge. We made a MyBlock but hit a roadblock because we couldn’t get our robot to stop at double black. Whenever we changed that the robot wouldn’t work at all.
Day 5 – We decided to try something different and use variable counting in order to make our robot stop at double black. This class we took an entire class looking at others codes for inspiration however we failed yet again. Our code just wasn’t working and we couldn’t figure out why.
Day 6 – Our code still was not working. We attempted using others coding ideas that were different. They had different line following codes but still had variable counting. However the codes were failing still. Our codes seemed like they would work but the codes intended action wouldn’t translate to our robot.
Conclusion
We failed at this challenge because of our code’s inability to translate to our robot. Although out code seemed as if it was right our robot wouldn’t even advance when we tested it. We never really got close to completeing the atlas stone challenge because we spent to much time on coding and never made any progress although our codes seemed to get better and better and more complex as we moved on.
Sean Nicgorski 