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Blind Robot Brigade - Lessons Learned

Our robot on its way to the goal.

Dan

• The most important lesson that I believe was learded throughout the entire egg hunt project had nothing to do with robotics at all. I learned how I am going to have to manage my time for college. The end of the term was very hectic and extremely tense with two sets of finals and projects going on at the same time. I think that I will be able to take this experience into next year and hopefully not procrastinate quite as much in college now that I know what to expect to some extent.
  Before this project most of the code we had worked on was using one sensor, and had a similar design. Most (not all) of the line following, light following, and wall following projects were set up very similarly. The egg hunt was left very open ended. We were forced to work out an entire process. We had to look at all of our resources, decide how we would like to use our sensors, build some sort of contraption that would allow us to mount all of our sensors and capture our targets, and then work on our code. The coding was not necessarily the most important factor, but design also played an enourmous factor.

Chris

• I'd better hope I learned some lessons from this project - the taxpayers of Massachusetts are paying for me to do so! All jokes aside, this project game me insight into the complexity of taking the ideal world of computers and making it work with reality. This is by far the most complicated project we've had this year, and I had to utilize all the skills I had to create a working robot for the competition. Before this course, all of my programming had remained on a computer, never daring to venture out into the cruel world of a microprocessor. Especially in this task, there were tons of factors that could influence the ability of our robot to react to the world around it. In the real world, the readings obtained from sensors vary based on minute factors that we may not be able to compensate for. I learned that all programs need to have a degree of tolerance to function within these normal variations.

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