The Importance of Sensing Distance

[cananian]

At IDC 2012 in June, Arnan Sipitakiat and Nusarin Nusen discussed how they are using Robo-Blocks-a turtle robot and “tangible Turtle Blocks”-to teach problem solving and debugging skills to 5- through 12-year-olds.

One of the things I learned from their presentation was that children had difficulty reasoning about relative angles. The Robo-Blocks

Comments

[points]

So would you then detect slippage for correction by looking at variations in sensed speed for a constant input?

[cananian]

You could look for "wheels stopped/stuck" by noticing the motor's not turning. There's also current feedback node on the motor driver. You could connect that to an analog input on the arduino and then detect "wheels spinning in place" by seeing that the motor was turning (quickly) but the motor current was low (ie, little load).