We connected the motors and the light sensors to the appropriate ports, and stabilized the main frame of the robot. Began making some decisions about how the robot was going to go about moving around the board. We decided on a right movement algorithm, so the robot would move right every time it possibly could. For example the first move would be to the right and then if it could move right again it would.

After several days of technical difficulties, we were finally able to connect the robot to the laptop, and run some code to make the robot move. In the first code we ran, we ran each motor in different directions at the same speed, which made the robot turn in place. We programmed each motor to run at a certain speed for a certain distance. This meant that in order to run one motor slower than the other, each motor must be run for a given distance which gives it the same ration of speed to distance as the other motor.

In order to move the robot around the grid, we had to program functions which would turn the robot to face each square around it. Once the robot was facing the square it needed to move to, we had to develop a function that would reliably move the robot to the center of that square. To do this, we used two light sensors on the front of the robot, and told the robot to move forward, until the sensors sensed the white line. This puts the robot in the same spot every time, and from there we can have it move a constant distance to put it in the middle of the square. With all these functions complete, we simply ran each one in the right order to make the robot move in a figure 8. Video is at 8x speed because the robot is so slow.

After testing the code several times, we were able to make it so that the robot will never kill itself, however often times it got stuck, and would not leave the same two squares. Despite this common problem however, the robot was able to solve some easy boards.