CSC and Sciborg Day 2.5 (March 17th)

CSC: 

We went to the CSC and observed children interacting with each other and their surroundings. We were informed about problematic situations a child might face in the CSC. We tried to be on the lookout for potential projects we could undertake that involve feedback and control.

Some interesting problems:

            Water and sand table spills and monitoring

            Trouble taking the full time to wash hands properly

            Loud sounds that startle the children and negatively impact their behavior (e.g. toilet flushing sound levels)

The people at the CSC talked about wanting the children to take risks. They also told us that a project involving positive reinforcement would be especially nice and insightful. We learned that at this stage in development, children are most responsive to visual indicators.

Some tentative project ideas:

            Volume control with visual reinforcements

            Sandbox/water table monitoring that involves a visual feedback, maybe a cube with four indicators on it that rotates according to sand/water level and/or weight in the table.

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Sciborg, Day 2.5

We began to explore bang-bang control using the encoders in our sciborg’s motors. Our goal was to get the sciborg to approach 10 feet as exactly as possible. The bang-bang control limited our approach, as the motors needed to be either fully on or completely off with no intermediate transition speeds.

 

We kept the motors operating at different power outputs, in an attempt to straighten the sciborg’s path.

We asked the sciborg to run at full power until the axle in motor 1 had rotated 12500 times. This number was determined by how close the sciborg came to the 10 ft mark. We found 12500 to be the number at which the sciborg passed 1 to 2 inches over the mark.

Once the sciborg completed the 12500 axle rotations, all motor outputs were reduced to 0.