Research Assistant, Institute of Information Science (IIS), Academia Sinica
Bio-Industrial Mechatronics (BIME), National Taiwan University
BIME ROBOTICS CAMP
An educational camp designed for high school attendants each summer, provided by the BIME department, NTU.
Attendants learn basic knowledge of microcontrollers, electronic circuits, programming, and so on.
All acquired knowledge will eventually be combined when attendants get their chance to collaborate and build a project.
COURSE DESIGN
ROBOT BUILDING
Learn basic mobile vehicle structure and mechanism by building your own robot.
MICROCONTROLLERS AND PROGRAMMING
The microcontroller used here is the Parallax Basic Stamp.
Programming skills are taught using the corresponding development environment.
EXPERIMENT: PHOTORESISTORS
Lots of circuit components are introduced to attendants, from operation principles, functionalities, circuit design to
microcontroller interaction.
The photoresistor is one of them. Attendants may observe its behavior when shining a flashlight towards it.
EXPERIMENT: INFRARED SENSORS
The infrared sensor (and emitter) is another component attendants will work with. Working principles are introduced using analogies of natural effects and phenomena, for example, the difference of infrared ray absorption between white and black surfaces.
PROJECTS
At the end of the camp, attendants will collaborate with team members to participate in final projects.
These projects are in the form of competitions and are highly related to previous lectures and labs.
PHOTORESISTOR BALLOON CHALLENGE
Two teams compete at the same time.
Each team's robot has several pins fixed to the robot's front edge and a balloon attached to the back.
Four photoresistors are added to the microcontroller circuit, in order to serve as "direction keys" for computer games.
In a similar logic, the competitor holds a flashlight towards a specific photoresistor, to control the robot to move in the corresponding direction.
The winning condition for a team is to pop the balloon behind the opponent team's robot.
FOLLOW THE BLACK TRACK CHALLENGE
Utilizing the infrared sensors' operation principle, a correctly programmed microcontroller may determine whether its infrared sensors are facing towards a black or white surface.Â
If two pairs of infrared sensors are installed on the front bottom edge of the robot, the robot can be maintained on a black track and simultaneously advance along it.
The rules of this challenge is, each team member get to randomly draw one card with a track drawn on it (as illustrated in photo on the right). Ten members then discuss how to arrange the ten cards into a single track.Â
Finally, the robot is placed at the start and will begin its journey autonomously. Any team finishing the race in shortest time wins the competition.
