Lab 15: Building Square bot and doing the Electrical Tape Maze with and without Encoders

In this lab, we constructed the VEX robot.  The manual is available online at:
http://www.bit.ly/vexmanual .  We constructed the VEX robot according to the instructions except that we also added encoders for the left and right side of the robot.  The only thing we had to change out from the instructions were the 3" front square axels.  Those were switched with 4.5" square axels which were slightly longer to accommodate the encoder.

Here you can see we are assembling the VEX robot.



Once the VEX robot was assembled, we downloaded a program to the robot which would allow us to control it using a remote control.

Here you can see that I am controlling the VEX robot by using the remote control.  This exercise was only for practice and future movements by the VEX will be controlled using programming.



The next step was to write code that made the robot go where we wanted it to go.   There was a small course setup in the hallway with electrical tape that we navigated.  After a few trials of understanding the distances and numbers relating to the encoders, we were able to successfully navigate the course.

This video is one of our trial attempts that we used to determine travel distances and their relation to the encoders.  We only needed to make a few adjustments before we successfully completed the course without touching the course boundaries.


Lab 15 finished!