In this tutorial we present a way to align your robot to a black line. Go through common difficulties, that the teams face, when they need to align their robot, and provide a solution for them.
In a competition environment like the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) or World Robotics Olympiad (WRO) the color sensor is more than useful. It makes positioning on the field quite easy and precise.
This robot has a color sensor and this sensor is used for following lines. Additional Mindstorms EV3 sensors could be place on the robot, like a Gyro sensor or a second Color sensor.
We continue from part 3 where we finished part of the 'rear'. Power is transfered from a motor to the wheels but having about 16 gear wheels makes it more than complex for this LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Competition robot.
We are showing the first way we could position the motors on the robot construction. This seems to be challenging for many robot builders and that's why we are going to do it in a few different ways in the next few video tutorials from the series.
Last part of the series. The final touch of the program makes sure that it works and is following the line with the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Color Sensor in a smooth and fast way.
Looking at the field we must first think of a strategy of solving this line following problem. There are rules that the robot must follow and these rules should be programmed in the robot.
Based on feedback from many of you in this episode I would like to show you how to build an active attachment that changes the orientation of a gear wheel placed vertically to a gear wheel placed horizontally. This attachment could be used in competitions and shows a basic principle of changing the orientation. All attachments could follow the same principle.
In this episode we build a reusable attachment for a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robot that changes gears orientation and direction. It is one of the most useful attachments that you could use to move levers up/down and right/left. Adding the attachment on the robot takes 2-3 seconds and shows a very useful general principle of how to build reusable attachments.
We continue from part 4 where we made a controlled experiment to transfer power from a Mindstorms motor to the rear wheels. The construction was too complex and inefficient and in this video lesson we are improving it by lowering the differential and removing all gear wheels from this LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Competition robot.
We are programming this strange construction to move in a square. This is a basic task, but it is worth doing for a robot with motors placed in different directions.
Given the large number of gear wheels and axles in each EV3 and NXT sets there are many possibilities for building gear mechanisms. We are developing something like a gear box that has different axles that could all turn in different directions.
This is a third example for adding an active attachment. This third attachment is now connected to the wheel at the front of the robot. Again, the attachment could be easily extended.
We dispay the speed of rotation of the wheels on the brick screen. We use the math blocks to do a proper calculations from rotation to radians per second. Knowing the speed, the radiuses and the mass of the wheels we find energy in Joules accumulated in the construction.
The challenge for this video is to program a menu that is controlled from the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 brick screen.
In this tutorial of the series we would get into more details on how the flywheel works, what's its purpose and how the whole attachment is triggered with the first rubber band.
With this attachment we just share an idea. The attachment was build by an FLL team called Brother in Arms and they needed a way to turn two axles in different direction, one at a time. The attachment was not used in the final robot design and construction, but presents a nice idea.
