4th Year Robots

At KTC, the fourth year students have a four hour Creative Experiment class every Friday morning. In this class, they design, build, wire, and program rather large line tracing robots. The point of these robots is to guide a visitor to the main desk. They don't actually use these, but it's a pretty good project for the students. They have to make a robot that will follow the line, give some sort of "follow me" motion when started, and some sort of "hey, you're here" motion when it arrives at the main desk area. These robots are very stylized, and the students spend a heck of a lot more time making a theme and beautifying the robot than your typical 19 year old American boys would. This year, there were seven groups, each with a different design. There's a battleship, peach, pyramid, turtle, car, pig, and penguin.

I didn't get good video of most, or pictures of all of them, but they'll be shown off again. Here's a picture of the battleship. It's at the front desk area, so it stops and the guns rotate about. Pretty cool!

There's a couple more videos if you want to go to Flickr to look at them.

This is a pretty nice project. The kids all have to make a line following robot, which is pretty basic, but then they have to add the other mechanisms to it. That's where the design work comes in. They get to learn how to make what they're envisioning a reality. The penguin has an air pump and gear system that makes the wings flap and the party horn in its mouth work. The pyramid has a pretty nice mitered gear system to make the sides open. The battleship has by far the most intricate system for manipulating the guns. It's really cool to see the students sketch out their ideas, make a design, and then refine as the year goes along.