Content for Sensors

Turning with the Gyro Sensor on a specified angle and stopping there have never been easy. It is not going to get any better. However, this is not a problem of the Gyro sensor. The problem is in the way we develop our programs.

This video tutorial contains the final 2 programs for moving straight with a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robot. The first program is for proportional compensation that just keeps the robot orientation straight, while the second program is for Integral compensation that returns the robot to the straight line when the robot makes a mistake. 

The LEGO Mindstorms EV3 set comes with two LARGE motors. But even though these motors look almost the same they are not quite the same. There are always some differences in their behaviour. If you have more than two motors, because you bought them or you won them somewhere at a competition, it is worth doing an experiment to find which pair of motors works best. 

This lesson shows how you could use the rotation sensors of the motors of a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot. This technique is very powerful during the competition. We give ideas on how to show the value of the sensor on the display, how to check if you have completed a given job or you are still doing it and other even more advanced topics. Understanding the rotation sensor is a must if you want to use the full capabilities of the motors.

As an exercise try to implement the calibration of the minimum and maximum values for a single sensor. 

This animation demonstrates the principle of aligning to a line with two color sensors and a LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor robot. This is a useful concept for FIRST LEGO League competitions where you want to know exactly where you are on the field and to achieve consistent behavior. In the course lesson you will also find a live video tutorial where we enter into more details about aligning. We align the robot to a line by moving both sensors slowly until they both see a black line. When one of them sees the line we move only the other. At the end we return the first sensor back.

In this video tutorial we demonstrate the importance of properly shielding and protecting the light/color sensors of your LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor robots. These principles generally apply for all kind of robots. The problem is that external light sources from the venue could change the behavior of the robot - like have you ever been to a competition venue where the lighting just makes the robot behave in different ways? - well this tutorial is for you!

In this video tutorial we use the LEGO Education SPIKE Prime Motion Sensor to reach a mission model on the field. It's a basic use of the motion sensor that we will extend in the next few tutorials and in the same time we take the opportunity to demonstrate what a MyBlock is and how to develop one. As a result of this video you will learn how to make the program easier to read and maintain by organizing the blocks in the program in special MyBlocks that couple them all together.

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 10 out of 10 tutorials we do 10 runs that demonstrated how consistent and reliable it is to stop at the second intersection. This is useful as it is one of the main ways to figure out how to position yourself on the field.

In this video tutorial, we accomplish the FIRST LEGO League 2021-2022 mission called Platooning Trucks. The goal is to connect the two mission models (trucks) to each other and then connect them both to the bridge. It's quite an interesting mission as it involves three mission models.

Here's one way to program using a color sensor!