With any experiment, you may run into the bane of scientists everywhere - Hysteresis. One purpose of this challenge is to show that, though these are highly advanced technical machines, you may never get the same result twice. Indeed, one of the first lessons I teach my robot teams, whether middle-schoolers or graduates, is e.g. never assume the wheel turns one revolution just because you told it to. Open loop solutions often suffer from hysteresis (an output change based on the history of the experiment) while closed loop solutions try to overcome this.
Challenge Rules
This challenge is to see how close you can get to the far wall of the arena without touching. The rules are as follows:
The robot must start touching the West wall.
The robot that gets closest to the East wall - without touching - is the winner. A robot that stops while touching the East wall will be penalized 8".
Each team will get three runs. The team with the smallest sum distance will be declared the winner.
You can use any robot design but no external sensors (e.g. ultrasonic or light) may be used.
With any experiment, you may run into the bane of scientists everywhere - Hysteresis. One purpose of this challenge is to show that, though these are highly advanced technical machines, you may never get the same result twice. Indeed, one of the first lessons I teach my robot teams, whether middle-schoolers or graduates, is e.g. never assume the wheel turns one revolution just because you told it to. Open loop solutions often suffer from hysteresis (an output change based on the history of the experiment) while closed loop solutions try to overcome this.Challenge Rules
This challenge is to see how close you can get to the far wall of the arena without touching. The rules are as follows:Close Without Touching = Good!
Wall Touching = Bad!