I am introducing Arduino to my classroom and using the Bricktronics shield I have the idea for an end challenge to have students build and program a robot to navigate an obstacle course. I would like to make sure that I can be prepared as possible…
I am not sure if you are the guys to ask but I am wondering if I had a goal of “Students will be able to program a robot to navigate through an obstacle course” What understandings, in your opinion, would students need to make that happen.
Hopefully I can get someone to take a shot at what they think.
The students will need to know how to make the robot move without any sort of environmental feedback, i.e. moving motors to move the robot.
The students will need to know how to take in environmental feedback. This could be a lot of things, like line following, or bump sensors, or “edge of table” sensors…
The students will need to be able to integrate the two, which can be done in a lot of ways, but if they have low programming experience, may be relatively tricky! (I forget your background, but I definitely don’t mean to be insulting!).
I’ve had a fair amount of experience timeslicing the parallelism–instead of setting the motor up to run and then adjust the motors via environmental feedback, to have a time for motion, where the robot receives no input from the sensors, and then a sensing time. Doing this seems to help new folks debug the system. (There are some animals that seem to act this way, too, actually! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider) )