Project 1 - Testing

With our robot and our performance arena set up all that was left to do was to tweak them until they were compatible. We had a new thread arm to test, the principle worked well but the whole relationship between the robot and its surroundings meant it seldom got close enough to the hooks to hook up and as a result we had loose trailing thread that managed to catch on everything. We decide to adjust and retest.

Everything required slight adjustments, the hooks on the arena were bent further to help them hold onto the thread no matter which direction the robot turned. The thread arms design was changed to a more solid build after two parallel blocks with rungs in between seemed to hook as often as the thread did; and thirdly we tweaked our program by shortening the ultrasonic sensors range and making it turn sharper, this brought the robot closer to the sides of the box so when it spun around the thread arm circled the hook and thus caught the thread before making its exit away from the obstacle.

This was a huge success for us as we had to try the trial and error approach to find the best values to control the robots movement in the limited space. We did still have occasional problems with hooking onto the thread arm and we tried several small variations of the design to find which worked the best.

With the demonstration coming up fast we decided to move our project to the chroma key room for our first formal trial.



We had a lot of success when testing. note for above: the white line is created by a continuously shining light while the red is flashing in even timing.



These photos show trials in light and 2D, note the straight lines, curved lines and the varying sized turns when the robot encounters the wall of the arena. In the above left photo a black light is used in conjunction with the light exposure to reveal both the marker and the light.

As an extra for our demonstration Anneke and I wrote a speech and paired it with some images of robots in traditionally human roles, the intention was to get the audience aware of our selected theme and to encourage them to form an opinion on the role of robots in the arts so we might get the opportunity to shock them with our multi-dimensional work after we turn the lights on following our live light drawing