|
|
|
|
 |
|
STUDENTS TEST ROBOTIC PROJECT |
|
|
|
|
May 06, 2008
GROVE CITY, Pa. – At the close of spring semester at Grove City College, engineering students tested projects completed over several months, a culmination of teamwork and course studies.
Leading the testing was Dr. Timothy Mohr, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Students in his Embedded Systems class tested their final projects – robots.
The students were divided into teams of two and receive a small robot – designed Mohr and Scott Jaillet, who assists on the senior design projects each year. The semester-long project involves writing a program so the robot can navigate an outdoor route.
“We wanted a series of labs to learn about microprocessors but we wanted [students] to have a lot of fun,” Mohr said.
Mohr’s class has worked with robots for three years. This year’s robots are three-wheeled vehicles with two large wheels on the front and a small wheel on the back. The robots consist of three main devices that the students must learn how to use to navigate the robot: range sensors that emit an ultrasonic pulse to figure out where they are, a microprocessor to control each individual wheel motor and a gyroscope chip.
In previous years the “navigation problems” the students had to solve were indoor problems. This year, the students had to figure out how to make their robot leave the north entrance of the Hall of Arts and Letters, travel down a ramp, across the courtyard near the Breen Student Union and travel up the ramp to the south entrance of the building.
| |
|
|
|
|
Print Page