Day 2 (Tuesday, June 8, 2010)

Today we completed building our first robot, Mybot within the Webots simulation environment. This is what it looks like. We had a few minor hiccups while implementing the robot, mainly small typos while entering the data, but finally everything worked out during the first half of the class. To the right is a picture of what the robot looks like.

In the second half, we looked at how to build intelligence into robots, using the controller of the robot. We learned that the contoller takes the inputs from the robot's sensors, processes this data and uses the processed data to 'move' the actuators of the robot. We looked at a very simple controller for the robot shown above that lets it avoid obstacles and walls.

We then used the e-puck robot's model inside Webots and worked on two more controllers - one spins the e-puck around, the second one lets the e-puck blink its eight LEDs one after another.

In tomorrow's class, Zachary will talk about how to program simple controllers on the e-puck robot. We will evidently use the e-puck robots for doing this. We have only one programmer device called ICD3 that connects a computer to an e-puck while programming it. So, please be patient while each group does the programming one after the other.