10 runs on how to move on an FLL competition field with LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor without sensors Pro Preview

Continuing from the last tutorial, we demonstrate the consistency and reliability of the robot when we don't user sensors. The result is pretty obvious - the robot is NOT consistent and reliable. It just makes a lot of mistakes

  • #1956
  • 03 Oct 2022
  • 4:04

There are many reasons for the mistakes - bumps, slips, differences in the motors and many many other. We hope that this tutorial will give you an understanding of why you should generally not approach the missions without sensors.

English

In this tutorial let's do ten runs. Ten runs with the LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor robot and see where the robot arrives if we don't use sensors and we just move the robot with the movement blocks. How consistent is the robot?

Start from base, move forward, turn left, move forward and you see where the robot is. And I'll place this phone from the FIRST LEGO League Replay competition just to mark the location where the robot arrived last time. Move again forward and you see that the robot is in a different place. We start the robot from the same place in base and every time we run it, it will arrive at a different place on the field. Same program, same robot, consecutive fronts. And that's the nature of this and basically any other robots, as long as we are not using sensors, if we are just relying on the motors and moving with the motors, this is how the program will behave. The robot arriving at a different place every time. And it's not a small difference, it's for just one turn it's a difference of about an inch, or about 2.5 CM. Which is interesting. Which is interesting. And there are many reasons why this behavior occurs. First, it might be the case that the wheels, they slip in different ways. And that's why in some of the Next programs will improve on this robot with the use of the acceleration block, which will reduce the slip. Then it is possible that for some reason one of the motors is more powerful than the other and it takes some time for them to synchronize when we start the program. This is also an explanation. It might be the case that the robot is slightly heavier to the right and to the left, but this robot is quite small. It's not this case. And it might be the case that the field is there is something in the field that's causing the robot to behave in such ways. As a result is we can use only movement, but you see how reliable the robot is. If this consistency is okay for the mission that you are approaching, you can of course approach it without the use of any sensors. But if you need a more consistent behavior, we should definitely explore different ways to use sensors. You can see on this front, for example, the robot is very far away from the previous position. Imagine that you have to pick up the phone. Now we must start and we must pick the phone. Can we arrive near the phone so that we can pick it? No. You see that there was even a larger difference.

Again, my point here is don't try without the sensors. You see that the robot is not consistent and reliable until only only lose time. Try to replicate this tutorial. Try to replicate the behavior.

Courses and lessons with this Tutorial

This Tutorial is used in the following courses and lessons

Image for LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor Programming for competition with Word Blocks
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Image for Moving on the field without sensors
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