On the day we set out to video some of our challenges, we had a robot that worked pretty well, and all we needed to do was make all the little tiny adjustments.
Well, it turns out that making those adjustments took up a major part of our day. There were many different things that had to be adjusted because we didn’t see problems until we tested the robot in person.
The hardest part is getting rid of inconsistencies. For the Tidy the Toys and Feed the Fish we kept improving the path of the robot to do them in less time. This felt pretty easy since we could make educated guesses toward honing in on the perfect setting (i.e straight line is the shortest route etc.).
Here are a few of our troublesome problems in the Feed the Fish challenge:
1) The reload mechanism on the gun of the robot was inconsistent. It took a while to work out how to rotate the reloader exactly 120 degrees (1/3 a circle) because the cog attached to the motor was a different size than the cog that turned the reloader. It previously would move slightly more or less each time making one or more shots go off or simply not fire.
2) The power going to the motors was sometimes inconsistent. Even when the numbers didn't change, sometimes the robot would over-rotate or under-rotate on one side and end up out of alignment and miss the fish's mouth. It might have been from a wobbly floor, or a dying battery, or something else.
3) The ping pong balls gave us lots of trouble. We brought a bag of 50 coloured balls, they all seemed to react differently to being hit. Luckily, we also brought 5 "official" regulation ping pong balls which were more reliable.
In the Up the Garden Path challenge, the voice commands didn't work as well as we hoped. The robot was not easily controlled and it was either the Wifi, the Google Assistant software, the echoey room, or maybe even our Irish accents that caused big delays in Google's interpretation.
The theory was that we should be able to say all the directions at once - "forward forward left forward" - and have the robot do a chain of commands. The code worked, but Google didn't. Google AIY kept thinking we were saying different things (like "forwards" would come up as "4 warts" or "Ford words" or "foreheads").
In the end, that challenge took many tries but we finally got to the other end... in four minutes. We are sure we can do better.
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