MATLAB Day 1

Robot Programming Discoveries

We started off by going over some of the ideas for programming a robot. These ideas were done after an exercize that allowed us to be in the same shoes as a robot that was programmed and a person that controlled the robot. We were broken up into pairs (one robot and one controller) and were given about two minutes to create a way to communicate with our blindfolded robot. Once our two minutes were up, we had to guide our robot though an obstacle course in a race with other "robots" to the final destination. We were also observed by our peers, which made comments every time we crashed our robot into something.

Input And Output Data Process

We recieved our first look in how to output data using the givens initially stated. The data we were giver was a sample of temperatures every thirty seconds. We had to calculate the average temperature and plot the temperature vs. time graph. It is also important that we addressed the important assumptions we made because this allows us to later view if the assumptions we made were adequate enough to get adequate results or if we need to alter any programming to account of behavior that needs to be accounted for, such as neglecting air resistance or not.

The Egg Drop

We begin our first assignment, the egg drop, in the same manner as the input/output data process. We had to come up with a way to drop an egg from a height of 12 meters. We created an input/output data chart to determine the critical data at which the egg would break, such as using impulse, momentum, and energy to calculate key final velocities and impact forces. We determined that we needed to create a way to reduce the final velocity, which would reduce the impulse and impact force. Using a bunch of straws and a piece of paper, we created a parachute that would slow down the egg using air drag and result in a smaller velocity.

 We all predicted that our egg would land safely, but we stated some of the possible ways in which our parachute would fail.

This video shows how our egg drops in comparison to the first group. Our egg begins to drop at around 1:30. Our egg appeared to have dropped the safely (more so than every other group) but in the end, our egg ended up breaking because of the last minute accident, when the wind caused the parachute to flip on its side and, thus, making the egg vulnerable. Unfortunately, we only created a mechanism that allowed the straws to absorb most of the impact force on a vertical landing.

This is a picture of our egg inside the parachute, after the egg dropped from 15 meters.

Summary: 

   We went over some of the ideas of programming a robot and what to consider when programming. Then, we talked about the input/output data analysis technique for solving problems, which we would implement in our first assignment of dropping the egg. The idea was to efficiently brainstorm when solving a problem and carefully consider any variables that might have an effect on the solution.