Day 1: Skill Building and Apple Store
In this exercise, we used an Arduino to create a detector that changes the light color based on the distance of an object. We were able to build our knowledge on Arduino, which we then could use on our project later on.
This activity combined elements from our earlier project with an alarm system. It used a motion and object sensor to detect if something entered a certain range. When it did, the system triggered an alarm and caused an image to start shaking.
We were fortunate enough to go to the Apple store at the Grove for a lesson on how to code in the Swift programming language.
Day 2: Working on Projects and Speakers
The main objective for the ZUMI robot was for it to avoid obstacles. For this, we used Jupyter Notebook to code the robot in python to make it rotate one way if it found an obstacle, then rotate the other way if there was still an obstacle in that direction.
Day 3: Working on/Finishing Projects
For this activity, we created a 2-wheeled vehicle with a sensor that can detect obstacles and move around them. We are using the same technology from this in our final robot.
For this activity our objective was for the EZ-Robot to walk forward, recognize a person's face, then turn around to walk back. For this, we used blockly to write a simple script for the robot to say "Person Detected" when tracking a face, and we used the already present commands for the robot to get it to move.
For this activity, we programmed a robot to follow a black line using infrared sensors and detect and avoid obstacles around it using an ultrasonic sensor.
Day 4: Finalizing Projects/BattleBot
The goal of this activity was to combine our previous robots into one. We used the bumper sensors from our Arduino path-finding robot and the sensors from the Arduino 2-wheel car to detect obstacles. We programmed this to detect and go around objects in a couple of ways.
This was the final project for Week 4. The goal of this activity was to make a robot to fight the other robots and hopefully win.
Robotics focuses on the design and application of robots to perform tasks. Much of the time, the goal is for the robots to perform tasks and provide assistance to humans. This can include automation of processes, which is often seen in assembly and manufacturing. It also includes more mundane activities, such as robot vacuum cleaners to help people in their everyday lives. Robotics is an interdisciplinary field, as it's robots require knowledge from the mechanical, electrical, and computer science fields.
Computer science is the analyzation of computational systems, theory, design implication, and application. Often considered to be one of the most distinct fields of STEM, computer sience has allowed society to move forward in technology, making new algorithms, calculations, and eventually AI. Essentially about understanding how computational systems work, computer science can theoretically be an endless field, continously making new advancements in computers and software. Computer science can also be combine with other fields of engineering, as it provides a strong background to building one's own computations, and promotes critical thinking.