05 Mission Instructions
Your mission is to create a robot that starts an interaction when a human approaches. Your robot should be friendly and act as naturally as possible.
2. Design: About Servos
For this mission, you have received a servo, and you are invited to use any of the sensors from prior missions (we’ll use a distance sensor in our examples below). A servo is basically a motor with an arm attached to it, but instead of only controlling the speed of the motor, we can control its exact position. [Fun fact: The technical term for a servo arm is a horn.] Servos allow you to add motions like waving or pointing at things.
Think about ways that people or animals move when they first spot each other and want to invite this new visitor to come closer. Some ideas to get you started might be waving a hand or wagging a tail.
Choose the movement you want your robot to make to invite you to come closer when it notices you and write in words some of the details about that behavior.
For instance, in the sample program we’re using today, we’ll be creating a robot that waves its “hand” side to side like a human. To prepare for this, we walked around our office and our homes waving at friends and family and colleagues. As we waved at them (and they waved back), we paid attention to things like:
- How many times did their hands move from side to side?
- How long was a wave in total?
- Did everyone start their wave on the same side?
- How far to the side did people tilt their hands?
Based on the information we collected, our program will wave back and forth with 3 side-to-side motions and take roughly 2 seconds. The people we waved at didn’t tilt their hands very far, so we’ll try to create a narrow waving pattern for our first robot.