Video tutorials -

• FIRST LEGO League

Using everything that we've learned about LEGO Education SPIKE Prime competition programming we arrive at the final boss mission - how do we consistently reach a mission model at the other end of the field. Consistently. Every time. We use line following, motion sensor, counting of lines and border alignment. All the different concepts that we've looked at separately are now implemented together.

In this first part we stop at an algorithm that is the base for following lines and explains the basic idea for the proportion. A must watch if you want to understand the robot at its behaviour. At the end the program still wont work so check out Part 2 and Part 3 for the final steps.  

We start a course for following a line with crosses and gaps. This is a challenge that one of the users at FLLCasts.com was trying to accomplish and asked us for advice. We present the whole challenge to you step-by-step. But first, let's also see the whole run of the line following algorithm. With this course, we also do an introduction of using State Machine as a programming pattern.

In a competition environment like the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) or World Robotics Olympiad (WRO) the color sensor is more than useful. It makes positioning on the field quite easy and precise. 

Looking at the field we must first think of a strategy of solving this line following problem. There are rules that the robot must follow and these rules should be programmed in the robot. 

This is where the confusion really comes. We are keeping the robot orientation straight while the robot moves, but at the end the, robot is not at the fiinal location that we would like it to be. The robot is still about 2-3 centimeters away after moving for about a meter.

The way you move the robot is always imprecise. Don't TRY to fight with this. Programming motors for competitions like the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) or World Robotics Olympiad (WRO) is not very different from programming the motors in the STEM classes. But there are a few things you should have in mind. 

Would you like to resolve all the problems with the light/color sensors that you have? And to make all of them work in a predictable, stable way even when using more than one MINDSTORMS colour sensors. 

When using Color sensors it is important to calibrate them depending on the light conditions in your venue. In this way, the calibrated sensor will show values between 0 and 100 independent of the light conditions. But using the default EV3 colour calibration available in the colour sensor block could lead to unpredicted problems that are difficult to track and resolved especially when used with multiple Color sensors. So in this series of tutorial we implement the calibration ourselves discussing the principles of colour sensor calibration.

Football with robots could be quite fun. Football with LEGO Mindstorms robots is one of the popular categories for competitions with LEGO Mindstorms Robots. 

Following the previous tutorials from the course, implement the calibration of the minimum and maximum values.