Logo Robotika.SK Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Slovak University of Technology  Logo Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University 

Deadline of this assignment is set to: 2016-03-11 20:00:00

1. Task: Rescue Robinson and Exact movements

Every round will contain two tasks, each is worth 3 points. The tasks are evaluated independently of each other. You will earn the maximum of the two scores. For instance, if you earn 2.3 points for the first task, and 2.5 for the second task in this assignment, you will earn 2.5 points to the overall league scores. At the end, we will award not only the team with the best result, but also a team with the highest sum of "unused points" - i.e. the sum of all minimums in all rounds.

1. Robinson Crusoe (a usual LEGO man) is lost at an isolated island. Construct a robot that will rescue the man using only a single motor. Your robot (think about it as a ship) is located on a flat surface (you can imagine that it is sailing the sea). It is terminated in a distance of 30cm by a wide block with the height 10cm (island). When the robot pushes on the block, the block does not move - it is fixed. Robinson is standing on the island in the distance 1cm from the border between the sea and the island.

starting situation

Build and program a robot that will only use one motor and that will sail to the island first, then board Robinson and bring him to his home land. Robinson's home land is located 30cm from the original position of the boat in exactly opposite direction than the island. The way how you unload Robinson is left to your imagination. You can drop him on the land, or to a manually operated rescue boat - it will not influence the scores.

Drawing from the book The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

2. Construct any robot and program it to go around a square with dimensions 1x1 meter. Mark the point where it has started and the point where it has finished. Repeat the experiment at least 10 times. Try to explain what you find out. Will the robot always come to the same spot or will its final location differ? Plot a graph showing the distance of the starting and terminating location in every trial. Is the error constant or does it change at random? After you analyze the outcome, try to improve it in some way - change the program or the robot construction or both. Repeat the experiment and compare the results. What happens?
experiment result example

Solutions