Day Three: John Silver, the Cyborg

So our last class, we got to play with these creatures called cyborgs, they were like advanced versions of the previous crickets we worked with.  They are referred to as RDS crickets.  More sensors/output devices could be plugged in.  Anyway, when I heard cyborg I had immediate flashbacks to Treasure Planet and the warning, "Beware the cyborg," so I've decided to refer to the cyborg as John Silver. 

Our first task was to teach Johnny that once he knocks into something, he needs to back-up.  This movement was called The Bounce.  This wasn't too difficult.
The next task involved further developing The Bounce to assist John Silver in escaping a corrall of boxes.  With a few openings, he needed to get out, The Escape.  Here is Johnny in his quest of trying to free himself.

The final task was accomplished in two different ways.  Going The Distance (A) involved counting.  The RDS cricket would count the rotations of the wheels.  So we had Mr. Silver go a certain number of wheel rotations and measured the distance he would travel.  From there we just used a proportion to find how many rotations it would take for John Silver to travel 1.5 meters.

Here is a view of our PicoBlocks.  The number was slightly different as we had just tried

  

to go downhill and stop.

Going The Distance (B) was accomplished, not with counting, but with sensing dark and light.  We had the sensor on John Silver that would sense the darkness or lightness of the color it was facing.  So if we had a dark piece of tape, or light, at the finish line, we could tell John Silver to stop when he sensed the change in light/darkness.  We experimented with the distance between the sensor and discovered the closer to the material the sensor is the greater sensitivity to light.  So this was good and all, but what to do next.

The final sequence we taught John Silver the cyborg was stayin on the table.  If he sensed the edge of the table(the equivalent of darkness) he would stop and retreat from the edge.  This sequence caused some issues for us as we tried to reposition the sensor.  We wanted it to be close enough to sense the lack of light, but we also needed it in the front, otherwise the front wheels would go off and John wouldn't have time to back up before his rear wheels followed his front.  We found the perfect front position for our cyborg and it was a success.

With all the tricks we taught John Silver, its no mystery why he was able to get off the RMS Legacy, with his RDS Cricket programing of course.