The morning began with David Arnstein bringing in a box of donuts for everyone. This was very nice of him given that he was on time and not late. Thank you, David!

Jared began the day’s lectures on the topic of motors. He covered various methods of motor speed control, focusing mostly on pulse width modulation (PWM). Next, for motor direction control he discussed half bridges and H-bridges and finally moved on to servo motors and stepper motors. We then went into the lab to apply what we had learned to the control of servos. In the morning session, we worked mostly on controlling a standard servo by writing code that would control the servo’s angle via PWM.

After lunch, Jared covered robotics and a brief history of the original conception of robots in literature along with the rather impressive developments that are going on now in the field. The lecture was brief and we went into the lab to work on controlling continuous servos since those would drive the wheels of our first robot, the BOE Bot. The group was able to successfully build the robots and drive them as per the instructions in the BOE Bot robot kit. Some started experimenting on our own with making the robot do different things. Prasad and I began programming it to move in a square. We were able to make the robot make three left turns, bringing it near its starting point; however, the pattern was far from a perfect square. Our challenge now is to figure out how to make it turn at right angles more precisely.