So I've been working on robotics team instead of tech crew this quarter, and that means that basically I'm the head programmer/electrical board guy. So this year, the hardware crew actually built us a testbed (a robot that is basically four wheels, only two of which are powered, and leaves the rest up to us), which means that as we develop the code for the main robot we can put it to test immediately and make sure it works. This also means that we get to write a lot of really awesome code that does something COMPLETELY worthless to the final robot, but looks cool. We took some video of the robot chasing down a green light sitting on top of a wheely-chair so that we could pull it away and do all sorts of cool stuff. The full video is around five minutes long and mostly includes us watching it try and center desparately on really crappy wheels. Unfortunately being five minutes long also makes it a hundred plus megabytes to download. As good as my bandwidth may be with powweb, that means that, at most, only seventy downloads would make it through before my server would decide to shut down for bandwidth reasons. So I'll write a script that allows, at most, ten downloads of the file (per day) before turning off, thus limiting bandwidth consumption to one gig daily. Trust me, that's a lot. Anyway It'll probably be up sometime tomorrow. The folder that the videos are in is password protected, so don't bother trying to download it, only I have access.
Posted by Kickmyassman at January 26, 2006 11:58 PMI've always thought robotics were cool, but never got around to being part of them. Do you program them in some programming language you know, or do you have to learn a new language for the robot? Do you even learn a high-level language, or do you program directly into it (highly unlikely, might be a stupid question).
Posted by: Andrew at January 31, 2006 07:10 PMYou program the robot in a combination of assembly and C. Though it is mostly C, the assembly plays a role in programming for sensors that watch really fast things (like gear teeth turning, sometimes hundres of times a second). But that's just in declaration. Anyway, yeah, it's cool.
Posted by: Kit at February 1, 2006 07:59 AM:/ sorry?
Posted by: s at February 2, 2006 03:09 PM