The EZ-Robot humanoid is a small, programmable walking robot made from multiple servos, a central controller, and a camera. It’s designed for education and experimentation, so you can code its movements, have it walk and turn, and use its camera for basic computer vision tasks like detecting colors or objects and reacting to what it “sees.”

The typical block for detecting color had some major flaws. Namely, the entire code would be forced to stop if there was no color detected. So we looked into the actual javascript behind the block code and found it was made up of a few lines of code. We then used this to create custom JavaScript blocks and some regular blocks to be able to constantly moniter the color detected by the camera. We used this to be able to scan multiple times during 1 program.

Because the robot’s walking motion was very inconsistent, we decided instead to have it slightly turn its head to look into each room. This not only improved accuracy (by using two servos whose positions we always knew) but also increased speed by reducing the required motion.