I found this exercise to be very enlightening and eye opening as to the possibilities of what can be accomplished when given a particular task in BCT. There were robots that conveyed art through light, color, and yes even by drawing in rice and hair gel. During research at home i discovered the idea to convey our art style by using a game of some sort. This evidently was carried out by emulating the movements of the game "Snake."Our entire class were given the same task and yet so many different ideas were generated showing a never seen before connection between art and robotics. Most popular of which throughout groups was themed by disco. (see 2nd video). I thought was very creative, but at the same time it didn't leave a mark that could be referred back to. It required camera effects in order to create the image instead of the robot actually drawing the image. Another robot that was made poured paint from an altitude onto paper using a 3 motor system that calculated what paint to mix including red yellow and blue. This i felt was a great idea because it would always produce abstract art differently every time determined on motion sensing. However i felt the 'artistic reward' should go towards the robot that responded to sound and recorded its own movements to show the user where it had been commanded by banging on the box. I think this because this robot used the best method of dispersing its paint. It was organised and actually could have been mistaken for true gallery art!

How i felt about my own project?
At the very beginning of the assignment we interpreted the brief as instructing us to draw an image only on the confines of paper. Because of this we were extremely limited in the variety of ideas that we produced. Our kit was also very limited with parts and components from the start so we were forced to simplify our robot and focus more on the programming side involving Mindstorms NXT. We decided that instead of creating an image or drawing based solely on interaction, we would use it to our advantage and incorporate a game into our design. This brought about a purpose for the robot and allowed us to explore more variables. Late in our production we were forced to change most of our ideas due to the fact that we were unable to convert what we had on paper into a usable program due to our limited knowledge of the language of the program. Instead we devised different methods to work around the problem. For example, at this stage in design I had the idea for the robot to play touch rugby, where u had to avoid obstacles and get to the other side of the playing field before being touched 5 times. This despite an immense amount of tutorial research was unable to be done so I decided that if we couldn't create an “end” to the game then we would have to work with a looping system. And it was from this that I was inspired to create a game similar to the game of “snake” on a mobile phone. We were now able to change the direction of the robot (acting as the snake) by simply touching the sensor. This also allowed us to interact much more than originally planned at the same time eliminating many unwanted variables that might ruin the game. Not only this, but the robot was able to interact with its own environment by detecting color. It was done by using many loops to compare different colors at each stop/start movement of the robot. This was a great accomplishment because it meant that we could introduce different environments and it would never draw the same thing, it would always be different. However in our last presentation we only experimented with circles regretfully. Not only that but it was designed to be used for much larger scale use instead of just A1 paper, this is because the aim of the robot was for people to steer it around the room using the touch sensor. I feel as though we did not convey our true intentions as much as we would have wanted to. Reflected back at our thought processes as a group I also feel as though we should have experimented with variations of different art styles. In a sense our thinking pattern was largely tunnel vision towards set goals of creating a game and not art. I feel if we had experimented with paint for example we would have created images that were more artistic. Yes, our 3 images were individual but they were also generic and visually similar due to the fact we only used 2 different colors, although the messiness of the blue pen did contrast well with the geometry of the circles. Overall I am satisfied in what we created, given more time I know that I would be able to unlock its true potential and explore a lot more in depth on the decorative side of this project.

Robot Messenger

On the second robot that we created we had to design it so that it traveled from the front entrance of the building to a particular office, and give the person inside something. We decided once again to do our own design from scratch and came up with the idea that the best way to do this was to create a robot that traveled on a programmed route to the office. The push sensor let the robot know how close it was the door. Once it was in the right position it would lower its motorized arm and push a note under the door for the person inside pickup. That was the plan anyway....

We ran into a few problems because of the construction of the robot. We relied on a preset path that we would program using trial and error in order to get to the office door. The problem was that if the robot wheel alignment was slightly off it would completely change how the robot moved. The axle of the robot itself wasn't very ridged which meant that this happened a lot to us. It never moved straight, it would always bow off to the left. This meant we had to compensate for the bowing by continuously incrementing the angles that the robot turned by adjusting the rotations of the wheels. This problem could have been fixed if we had used the light sensor from the NXT kit, the problem was that our kit was very limited in its contents and we didn't have access to one.

All in all the experience of designing our own robot was quite a fun experience, although i wish we had followed the preset building plan in the manual so we didn't have to waste so much time coming up with our own designs. Although that paled in comparison to the troubles we encountered with the NXT mindstorms programming itself which was riddled with bugs and ran at a snails pace with delays of up to 2minutes just to change a single setting. With that said, i hope that we never have to encounter this software again!

We were asked to design a new chess piece which had special abilities and to create it with character and theme in mind. We choose to invent the 'JESTER' which basically maneuvered around other pieces and was able to clone their abilities while at the same time eliminating them from the board. After we had accomplished this we were informed that we had to create a robot in the image of our chess piece. This morning we all presented our designed robots within a 2x2meter square to show what our chess pieces movements would like like on a chessboard. Our group encountered plenty of design problems as we chose to construct our own design instead of following a pre-made blue print of another vehicle. Our main problem was the fact that the rear wheel had to be able to rotate in all directions as to not skid and grip onto the carpet. To overcome this issue we placed a ball in between two wheel 'hubcaps.' This enabled it to slide easily across the carpet and also reduced the overall weight of the design. All problems aside, we did very well in the competition.

Short Film Exercise

The short film exercise was a very fun and inventive exercise. I played the role of an actuator, which in short meant i was the man in front of the camera while it followed me. Due to the lack of team members i was also designated for drawing the chalk illustrations around the CBD.
Reflecting on the exercise I realized that our group should have planned and executed instead of jumping straight on into it. We also did not fully understand what was being asked of us until we had started filming and because of this the quality of our work was greatly affected. Not only that but our group was separate during the video editing and because of this ideas and techniques were below our true potential. All this aside we produced a fine video and i thoroughly enjoyed the change in scenery from the classroom to the city.