Grade 6

Trees and Forests

The task is to drive to a location using latitude and longitude (between 51°N 118°W and 52.5°N 116.5°W), determine if the location is infected with Pine Beetle and report back. The screen of the NXT should show a grid with the robot's current location and a summary of the number of infected/healthy trees it finds. It also needs to display the results of the survey as a percentage and make a recommendation to help the forest become more healthy. You are required to defend your robot's decision to a panel including a logger, a wilderness tour operator, a Wildlife and Fisheries Officer and a resident.

I've included a PlotMePlus myBlock and a TreeComment myBlock as attachments (below). Help yourself but be aware they both require some tweaking to work with your robot.

Adaptations

Can you change your robot so it acts like an animal that responds to its environment? The animal robot must:

• follow a trail of pheremones to a food source
• find and react to a food source (you must build food "collecting" parts although the robot will be reacting to black paper as "the location of food")
• not encroach on another animal's territory
• react to an enemy by using a strategy used by an existing animal. The animal could run and hide, use camouflage, scare the predator using sound, distract, use spikes as a defence, use food-gathering equipment to attack, or any other strategy that has an animal precedent.

Archaeologist's Helper

Archaeologists in Greece wanted some help discovering where there might be possible ruins. The Grade 6 Robotics Experts had to design a robot that would travel across the ground and map the ground density, the theory being that the less dense the ground is, the more disturbed it is and the better chance they will find artifacts.

We decided to use the lights sensor to substitute for a ground penetrating radar for our prototype and use a trifold with areas of different colours to represent different density contours. Each group did 19 evenly spaced runs across the trifold and programmed the robot to take light readings at .5 second intervals. They assembled the data and made a 3D surface map using Microsoft Excel that they could rotate and examine to find the best spots to dig.

Each run was numbered from 90 to -90 because we were working on latitude and longitude at the time. No real archaeology dig would span the globe like this! Using lines of longitude like this encouraged the students to be able to use the grid pattern in a meaningful way.

Some of the parents who worked in the oil industry explained that what we were doing was very much like the sesmic work they do while exploring for oil.

Robots to the Rescue!

"If a skiier is buried in an avalanche, they have a very short time to be rescued. Me and my team designed a robot prototype that will help find and start performing immediate rescue aid to a buried skiier. We hope that this prototype, if it works, could be mass produced and scattered over an avalanche slope to find the buried skiier quickly so human rescuers could go strate [straight] to the skiier and help him."

The grade six students had to get a searching robots to find a skiier and signal the buried skiier's location to another team's robot. The second robot that had the "heavy and expensive rescue equipment" and would bring that to the location signalled by the searching robot.

Bluetooth communication required a lot of cooperation between groups and a lot of patience. The old robots could send one number using infrared mail but with Bluetooth you can send up to ten different values (including text) into different mailboxes.

The rescue robot had to start the communication and was the "boss". Once the searcher robot got a message from the rescue robot, it started searching by going up a number of lines (these we thought of as the human rescuers' ski poles) and turned 90° to start searching. If it found a skiier, it would back up and send:

• the number of ski poles (the x axis)
• the number of rotations of the right wheel (the y axis)

The searcher then got out of the way without running over the skiier and the rescuer had to get to the skiier to start rescuing using the x and y coordinates.

Tree Investigator

We are looking at how to navigate using Latitude and Longitude. See the Smart Board Notebook file below. Change the name from Canada robotics.txt to Canada robotics.notebook.