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!