Island 5 LEGO EV3 Driving With Sensors

What is it?

Students will be challenged  to build and program a robot with sensors. Robots use sensors to collect information about their environment in order to respond in an informed way.

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What Student Will Learn:

• How sensors influence robotic movement

• The parameters and potential of sensors in robot manipulation

• How to program a robot for greater performance accuracy based on sensor input

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What Are Sensors?

Robots use sensors to collect information. This information directs the behavior of the robot. 

You can compare robotic sensors to our own set of senses: touch, smell, hearing, taste, and vision. Without these information inputs, we would not be able to work effectively in and with our environment. The same goes for robots.

Consider this idea as it relates to humans:

• A phone rings. 

• Your ears hear the ring.

• Your brain makes sense of the sound.

• The brain sends a message to your arms and hands.

• Before you know it, you are answering the phone.

Whether a robot gathers information to determine its next action or to help us collect scientific data, sensors make the task easy and accurate by working with specific numeric values. They are much more exact than our five human senses.

For example, we can touch an object with our hand and say that it is "warm" or "cold" relative to our own body temperature, but this is a very general observation. Robots could use very precise temperature sensors that can determine if something is exactly 32 degrees or 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Some can even tell the difference between 50.2 degrees and 50.3 degrees Fahrenheit.