Robotics in our Everyday Lives

            When I started thinking about robotics, I thought about how they affected our daily lives. As I soon figured out, they are used a lot more than I thought they were. In fact, I found out that in my town they were using new robot technology to help students learn more about robotics.

            

             One use of robots is in education. For example, my brother's high school recently bought a new robot called "Projo". This robot is used in the robotics class at Randolph High School where it is used as a teacher and a robot that students program during class. There, they program it to do certain actions such as walk, talk, move around, and act like a human. In this particular high school, it is used more like a helpful tool to help the students learn more about programming and robotics. However, in other schools around the world, this robot is used as a teacher for younger students. But, they aren't replacing teachers or teaching a whole class, but rather the kids take turns spending time with the robot as an experiment to see how it effects them. Also, the robot is programmed to mimic human actions. In fact, Sophia Hollander from Wall Street Journal states, " the robots are programmed to... swiveling their heads when students speak, crying out when overeager kids get physical, and gesturing as they talk." This shows how these robots mimic certain actions to act more human like to help the students learn. All in all, robots are very useful in our everyday lives and they are very versatile.

Programming

               Programming is the writing or planning of a program. For the Lego Mindstorms ev3 robot, you would program it using the machine above. For the Mindstorms  ev3 robot puppy, we built the puppy and then had to program it. We programmed it to make the puppy show emotion, eat using the bone we built, pee by lifting its hind legs, and pet it and have it show happiness. The robot consisted of a color sensor and the bone. Once we finished building our robot, we programmed it by pressed several buttons on the machine to make it so that when it sensed that the bone was by the robot's mouth, it would make eating noises.
               When programming it to do these actions, we had to use the machine above. On the screen, it showed various colored blocks that had certain purposes in order to program it. The colors were green, orange, yellow, red, dark blue, and light blue. The green block was the action block which controlled the medium motor, large motor, move steering, move tank, display, sound, and the brick status light. The orange block was called the flow block consisted of simple actions such as start, loop, and wait. The yellow block controlled the sensor attachments to the machine and controlled how they worked. The red block was called the actions block and it controlled the movements the robot would do. The dark blue block was in control of advanced programs such as messaging, Bluetooth, and data logging. Lastly, the light blue block had previously used and saved programs. These colored blocks helped us to program our robot.
                All in all, our group used the colored blocks on the machine. This enabled us to truly bring our robot puppy to life and enabled us to make the robot do certain actions. Without the programming, our robot wouldn't have been able to do the actions that it could.

Our Robot Puppy

For our robot, my group decided to build the robot puppy. We built the robot after a course of three total class periods. After building our robot, the puppy had the ability to complete certain actions. Our robot puppy could "eat" using the red, yellow, green, and blue "bone" shown above. In addition, as shown in the picture above, the puppy could sit back on its hind legs. The puppy also had the ability to lift up one of the back hind legs and "pee" while a little sound effect in the background indicated that it was peeing. In addition, you could pet and press down on the robot's back and it would become happy and jump up and down. Also, the robot could demonstrate emotion that it was happy by the eyes becoming hearts and by jumping up. On the other hand, it could also demonstrate anger by having slanted eyebrows and an angry expression and by making a growling noise. All in all, this was an exciting experience and it was interesting to see our robot come alive from random Legos into our very own robot puppy.

                      This is my group after we finally accomplished building our robot puppy.

            P.S. Patrick was also in our group but he was making a funny face and wished to be removed.