Workshop Day 2 (June 19)

Today we looked more closely at how to move robots while avoiding obstacles in their path. We started with an introduction to a model of the e-puck robot inside the Webots robot simulator. We looked at a program that built on yesterday's mybot program to avoid obstacles, but runs on the e-puck robot instead of the mybot.

We then started exploring on the dynamics of the e-puck robot by writing a small program called speed_test. We specifically looked at how to rotate the two wheels of the robot at different speeds gives rise to different trajectories for the robot such as a straight line, a curved path, small and large circles, and finally, spinning the robot on its axis. After completing the program on Webots, we switched on the e-puck robots and connected them via Bluetooth to the computer running Webots. We then transferred the speed_test program to the e-puck robots.


We discovered that the simulated robots run much faster on the simulator than the physical robots. We adjusted the speed of the robots and tried different trajectories with them.

Then, we worked on using the pen on the simulated e-puck robot to make the robot draw patterns on the ground inside the simulator. We will use this program in tomorrow's (Wed) class by attaching Sharpie pens to the physical robots to make trails and draw patterns on paper.

 

In the latter part of the class, we wrote a program on how to work with the LEDs on the e-puck robot. The e-puck robot has a ring of 8 red LEDs around it. It also has an orange colored front LED and a green colored body LED. We wrote a small program to turn one or two LEDs on and off in a blinking fashion. Then we worked on a more complex program that does a basic robot 'dance' - it blinks the LEDs around the robot one after the other, and finally blinks the front and body LEDs, while moving the robot forwards, backwards and sideways.

.Once again, we worked with the program first on the Webots simulator and then transferred it to the physical robot. We started exploring how to control the speed of the robot and blinking frequency of the LEDs to make more 'dance' patterns.


For the last 15 minutes of today's session, the students were given a tour of the C-MANTIC Lab to show the larger robots, landmine detecting robots and a simulated modular robot called ModRED (along with a video of the physical ModRED robot). 

Tomorrow, we will continue work on the robot dance and start working on making patterns on paper with e-puck robots.