Monday, December 12, 2005

Recurring Problems-New Solutions


Hi Everyone,

Several work groups are experiencing the same problems. Some of these problems include, but are not limited to:

-Difficulty traveling in a straight line.
-Turning the exact desired distance or angle.
-Traveling a very precise distance.

When you experience any or all of these three problems you will find that accomplishing ANY mission will seem impossible.

Your group will not likely score any points until you master the ability to get your robot to go across the game field and end up where the mission is set up for you to complete.

Some groups have overcome turning issues by using pivoting wheels- Good idea! Ask the Galileo group how they got their two-pivot design to straighten up. They used the advice of Dr. Antreasian, our mentor, to design in flexiblity. Galilieo uses a two-pivot robot to turn accurately to attempt several missions. They have a hard time getting it to go really straight for some other mission. They have solved this problem with a simple but brilliant solution. Find out what they did.


One last thing today: You may want to change your way of thinking about the following idea. "My robot has a front end and a back end." On Wednesday, you will see a demonstration of letting go of this concept when you see the Mr. Wright/Mr. Daly robot perform in the Wednesday Student Teacher Smackdown MiniChallenge!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My group had a problem that our robot was very heavy in the front. So to fix this we had to add weight to the back. We also added an extra pivet to help balance it out.

Fred Wright said...

Gary, This is great. You have shown that you can solve a problem. And you can communicate how you solved that problem!