At the end I want to say that I liked the course and the project. Thank you for the opportunity to work with NXT robots and to have such experience. It was really interesting! :)

Here you can find our presentation for final seminar:
Final presentation

Final seminar

During the demonstration of the rescue robots I was surprised to understand that it is very interesting and exiting. All of us rooted for the robots and we were really disappointed and sad when some of them made mistakes. Of course the robots’ creators were the main fans, but all of us were involved into the demonstration.

Also I noticed that the robots based on NXT unit were better that the RXT ones. I’m not the specialist in it that is why I so not no the reason for this. May be it is just the coincidence that the algorithms of NXT robots were more difficult and intelligent and that is why they won the competition. Also it could happen that the RXT module has not so good details (like motors and wheels) or sensors. And that is why the physical construction of these robots is worse than the NXT robots.

I discovered that for all rescue robot teams the construction and design was the main part of the work. They also had some programming part, but it didn’t cause many problems. On the other hand some of rescue robot team members told that the construction was very complicated and still they have not been satisfied by their design. As I understand the algorithms they used are not too difficult and that is also surprising because I thought that the rescue robot algorithm should be quite intelligent. It was surprising for me because our team spent most of the time on programming and we didn’t think about the design at all.

On the other hand programming of the rescue robot is more difficult because its behavior depends on the rescue field design. So you can test it at home or on some test field and you think that it works fine, but during the competition the field map has some parts where your robot suddenly fails. No matter how your robot is programmed you are not secured from this situation. I can imagine that it is quite sad for the team members.

The same problem has teams who tried to create soccer robot. The quality of their strategy could be tested only during the real play. Also it depends from the strategy and construction of the opponent robot.

During final seminar after each presentation (we were almost the last group which present their work) my opinion about our theme and project improved every time. It was not because I did not like the other groups’ presentations and robot but because I like the type of our team. I mean that we could test our robot and the software we wrote at home, and I can hardly imagine the situation in class which we could not model at home. May be the spirit of competition is very good, but I psychologically fell well when the result of my work does not depend on other people. As I understood the competition results would not influence on the mark, but I can suppose it was very sad to see that the result of your monthly work looks loose the game.
Of course this is only my opinion so other people like to do the soccer or rescue robots. But I want to say that it was very good to have an opportunity to choose the other type of task, not the creating robot for competition.

This is an illustration of the short robot construction process. It happens not at the beginning of the development (as it should be), but at the middle of it.
We reconstructed robot's tail because it did not look like NXT Spike's tail

Concerning the last post. I detected that one of the wires is blocked up closed to motor. That is why the motor worked badly. And also that was the reason for the huge amount of batteries we used – the motor tried to work but couldn’t.

Our robot eats too many batteries! We’ve already bought 2 packs and I think it is not the end!

Actually I’m not sure that it is normal. I do not think that that 2 motors (3^rd one haven’t been used yet) and small processor requires so many batteries. And also one of the motors does not work well. At the beginning we thought that it does not work at all, but later on we noticed that he worked in 40% of times. May be one of the contacts is faulty?

Our progress…

Now we’ve already paired the mobile phone and the robot (it was also difficult because of the pairing code which is hard coded into the robot), but they have some difficulties in protocol. The data is sending in some strange way and we can not find the rules and logicality. I was surprised to find that there is actually no documentation about the Bluetooth protocol and the rules of data transmitting. This forces us to search answers for all our questions in experiment. This means that we are trying sending it different sets of integers and after that we look on the received result. Of course this approach is quite original and new for us and it develops online theory generation, but actually I do not like it. I fell that I do not understand the idea and trying to use brute force algorithm. As I know from my previous studies it can give the result after huge time period and it is not appropriate in this course.

Actually I thought that it would be easy to find information. Possibly knowing these problems in advance I would select more common task. In this case I would even have an opportunity to ask my group mates about the problems I faced. Moreover I can assume that almost all problems of the groups who choose similar projects are the same. This gives them some advantages. On the other hand we will do something almost new and it can exceed all our problems. Of course in case if we will overcome those problems and receive some result.

According to the seminar:

I think that intermediate presentations were not very informative. Logically I understand the idea of having such seminars: they give teacher information about each group progress and also enforce students to do something during the semester instead of doing all the project on the last week. But for me they are boring a little because actually there is no enough student activity during one week of work to create interesting presentation.

It was interesting moment during the last weekend. The friends of mine visited me and found the Lego Mindstorm which was forgotten on the table after several unsuccessful attempts to tune it up, write something for it and the last but not the least to see the result. I was really surprised because they forget everything and began to play with it as it was the best thing in the world. We programmed the sensors in a way we saw in videos on youtube.com web-page – now our scorpion tries to bite if it sees something close to his “eyes”.

Actually I thought that robots are attractive for kinds, may be for teenagers who are interested in engineering sciences. But it turned out, that for 23 years old mans who are not too old and serious, but adults such kind of robots is very exciting. After that 2 of them said that they were going to buy a set of Logo Mindstorm on Monday.

For this kind of people those robots cannot be called educational, because they’ve already know foundations of programming, engineering and other sciences which educational robotics usually helps to study. I’m not actually sure that they will get some imaginary knowledge from playing with robots, but I definitely thing that it is good to have such practice.

So now we are going “Remote control” system to control the robot using mobile phone. We’ve already install Lejos operating system on our Lego Mindstorm, and configure the development environment. After that we’ve tried to write some java code for robot, and it was successfully loaded and executed. Moreover we installed Nokia phone emulator to test our application. So, now we finished preparatory and tuning part and ready for programming our project. We are going to begin during the weekend.

So is our group – for last week we had not seen our robot and had not decided what exactly we would do during our project. We tried to think about “Programming for LEGO NXT using mobile devices” but we found some difficulties. The biggest problem was how to compile code on mobile device. The code is compiled not by Java compiler, but by special compiler which is required to be rewritten for mobile device (for example pocket PC). We decided it was too complex task and we could not do it in time.

During first follow-up seminar I understood that actually nobody had done something really important and interesting for that moment. Most of us were telling some general things and showing presentations with beautiful pictures.

While I was reading the articles for this week task, I was really surprised to know about PicoCricket robot. On one hand it is similar to LEGO Mindstorm kit but on the other hand it is quite different. It is much more female and festive, and it is of course more suitable and interesting for small girls than any “soccer player” robot. I was not expected such king of robots and also I was not expected that the question how to attend more girls into the robotics is under discussion and many peoples are engaged in it!

During last lecture I was amazing about the way children write the programs for LEGO. These icons and links are strange colored, but they are understandable! It really can improve the process of basic programming topics education. I remembered at once how did I explain the “for” loop for the children from 6^th form and they could not understand it in no way

But on the other hand I cannot actually understand what does mean “using robots in education”? The one thought I have is to give them for children to learn them the basic ideas of programming and engineering. It is quite narrow area from my point of view but we talk about “educational robotics” as if it is one of the main ways to use the robots.