Jeff+Michaels


 * //Here is the Science Fair Paperwork collected for your groups this week.... Brian and Jodi Burda//** [[file:Michaels_20120305.pdf]]
 * Student:** Julian Moran will provide you with a hard copy of his report on Friday, March 8th.

Mr. Michaels, For the science fair, Julian M. and I are planning to compare solar panels and commercial batteries in remote control cars. We are going to compare the amount of the batteries time and we are going to compare their cost. From, Ethan R.

Mr. Michaels, Hi this is Julian M. I am working with Ethan to see if solar panel are better to use then regular batteries. Do you have any ideas or questions about our experiment?

Julian M. and Ethan, I think you have some good ideas. There is definitely a cost trade-off that could be performed between solar and battery power. Due to the limited power from the solar panels for a given size, you might have difficulties building a solar panel for a remote control car. You might consider using solar power to charge some rechargable batteries instead or you could use solar panels to charge some other device. Hi, Jeff Michaels my science project is a robot to pick up cans. So, I started asking myself questions like: How does the robot avoid hazards (wall, stairs); how does the robot detect objects which aren’t a can or a full can? (Chair leg); how does the robot dispose of the cans? How does the robot detect cans? How does the robot cover all the area in its environment?

Well I think I can answer some of those questions. The robot should use an ultra-sonic sensor located at the front of the robot which can rotate 180 degrees. This allows robot to detect cans both in front of and side to side of the robot. That same sensor allows the robot to line up with and sense walls to maintain a search pattern. If the robot is too far away from a wall to detect it, it will try its best with drive shaft encoders and maybe an accelerometer to keep it going in a straight line. The robot will most likely use a claw to pick up the cans in practically any position to which the robot is facing it, but this method of picking up the cans only allows it to carry one can at a time so I have decided to put a plate on the back of the robot to help it store one more per trip to a bin or a can drop zone. The bin would contain some sort of beacon like a light source.

Anyway, are there any questions or comments that you may have? -Julian B. Julian B, You have some really great ideas. Can you think of a good experiment that you could do related to this? There are many challenges that robots face that you can look at. You could compare different methods robots use to pick up an item such as an aluminum can or possibly different methods of sensing objects or different methods of navigation.