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Lab5HigginsWallFollow

Wall Follow
Dan Higgins

Red Cohort

Summary
The Purpose of this lab was to get the robots to follow the wall and get around corners and other obstacles. We had to use external wall sensors to identify where the walls were and how to get around them.
My Robot

In this project I used two wall sensors. I placed the short range sensor on the side of the robot pointing towards the wall. I used this sensor to keep the robot the same distance from the wall the whole time. If the robot moved farther away it would move towards the wall and as it got too close it would move away from it.

     I used the long range sensor on the farthest right edge of the robot facing forwards.  I treated this like a long range bump sensor.  Whenever the robot would get within a certain range it would stop and turn about 20 degrees to the left.  This may happen more than one time, but i found that if i made more of a turn then the robot had trouble finding the wall.  This way it would turn slightly once or twice and then be picked up by the side sensor and begin following the wall once again.
     The other sensor I used was the bump sensor.  I used it only as a precaution.  If the robot were to get into a situation where it was not picking up a wall in front of it and did not back up, then the bump sensor would use the exact same function as the sensor facing forwards.  It would back up and turn about 20 degrees to the left.

Lessons Learned

* I learned to use external sensors and values to control my robot
* I learned to create funtions and how exactly they can be used
* I learned to better use the cricket display to debug my program
* I learned to always have back-up pieces of your code (bump sensors) to fill in any holes the rest of your code may have
* More code is not always better because it can sometimes contradict other parts
* One line of code can mess with you entire program

Code Δ
Flow Δ