Joe O'Reilly

I found item 3.d of The Chartered Institute for IT’s (2013) Code of Conduct interesting. It states that you should “NOT disclose or authorise to be disclosed, or use for personal gain or to benefit a third party, confidential information except with the permission of your Relevant Authority, or as required by Legislation”.

The Chartered Institute for IT’s (2013) Code of Conduct item 2.b states you should “not claim any level of competence that you do not possess”. Before I started University I worked as a freelance web developer, this meant I regularly had to provide quotes and estimates to clients.

As an IT professional with Dyslexia I’ve always been aware that software, services and people in the IT profession should do their best to cater to those with any kind of disability. My reading while quick is often error prone and sometimes doesn’t convey the meaning of the text to me fully, to cope with this I have made use of the text-to-speech software built into the OS X and iOS Operating Systems. I often find myself struggling with image based PDFs and poorly formatted web pages that cause this technology to make mistakes and sometimes not work at all....

7.1

Choice of Sensors

We setup the robot with one forwards facing bump sensor and two sideways facing ultrasonic sensors. This allowed us to account for most of...

6.1

Familiarisation With Data Logging and Plotting

This program moves until it reaches 15cm (anything less and it hit the obstacle) then turns in small increments 10 times and logs its sensor readings, then stops logging.

The second strategy from the sheet was a little more complicated, we start logging data imediately then move until we're in range and then turn slowly waiting .25 seconds between each turn.

The final strategy added a turn to the left of 45° so we could scan the whole feature not just...

3.1

Familiarisation with detecting distance

3.2

Use ultrasonic sensors to avoid obstacles in the arena, including walls

1. We conducted a test to see what ultrasonic sensor orientation would allow our roboot the best view of its suroundings, if you look below it's obvious that fixing it parallel to the floor is optimum.

While I probably wont have time to investigate this I think a factor that could be more curcial to...

2.1

Under the help section, locatio program 18.Detect Touch and program your robot to achieve the challenge brief

Here's the program I built.

Here's a quick video demoing it working.

Move Until Bump

2.2

Implement robot behaviour where each contact or touch is met by a reverse and 90 degree rotation

1. Investigate how you can use the touch sensor effectively in order to avoid long contacts with obstacles.

The wait block that pauses execution until a bump has been made only works in a few conditions, if you give...

5.1

Basic Obstacle Detection & Avoidance With Touch

Bumper Attached and Ready

Below is the algorithm that moves the robot forwards until its bump sensor is activated when it stops, backs up and turns.

Move and Bump

Here is the back turn behaviour, stop motors, move back turn on the spot towards the right hand side.

Back Turn

5.1a

Touch-Based Obstacle Avoidance as a way of Traversing a Simple Maze

We used the algorithm described in section 5.1 and attempted to navigate a maze. There were a handfull...

4.1

Approach an obstacle and stop

Using the first algorithm in the lecture notes I built a program to move towards an obstacle until the sensor reading below a certain value.

Algorithm One

var distance while distance <= 20cm distance = sensor reading if distance > 20cm move forwards 1cm loop 

Loop Control

You can see there is one main loop, containing a sensor block and a compare block. The result of this comparision is then used to decide if the robot should move forwards or not. You...

1.1

Use the challenge brief given for program 0.3 Drive Forward and its accompanying Programming Guide both located under help section as shown below to achieve the challenge brief. Also, try 04. Reverse program.

I did this fairly quickly as it only involved using one block. Here is forwards:

With its settings.

Here is backwards

With its settings.

1.2

Now that you know how to move your robot, you are required to use the move block to move your robot in a straight line