I am happy to share Part 1 of the demo I took to the Orlando Mini Maker Faire. This video covers the basics of what The MathWorks provided me. As you can tell by the video, it is somewhat dependent on lighting. But let me describe what the base demo does.
The setup is 3 NXT robots running Simulink code that communicates with my computer. There is a camera positioned about 6 feet above the robots. Each robot has a unique pattern that can be seen by the camera. Using this pattern we can determine the position and heading of each bot.
The demo tries to get the robots to form a triangle. The position of the triangle is determined by the user. The robots will follow the triangle as the user moves it. Check out the video above to see the tech in action! While the video was shot in my apartment, the picture, right, was from the Orlando Mini Maker Faire.
Now I love sharing cool tech with people, but I also love to put my own twist on it. What if we made the demo interactive and allowed kids to draw lines? One might think a robot or a group of robots might follow that line. One might also thing that adding more lines of different colors might allow different robots to follow different lines. Of course that is all speculation. Maybe the photo below will be a helpful hint. 😉
Milluzzi Labs 