LEGO MINDSTORMS

The EV3 Medium motor is the first motor that we can use to drive the attachments on our robots.

So far, we have been moving only the wheels of our robots. With the help of the medium motor, we can now move arms, lifts, actuators or anything else attached to a robot.

There are several important things you should tell your students:

• place angular L-shaped beams at the end of the pivot points of the robot if it’s unstable;
• be careful about the height of the robot so that your filler is below the belt of the previous robot. Otherwise, the balls won’t be able to continue from one robot to another;
• be careful about the height of the filler as sometimes it is too low and the ball cannot be picked up by the conveyor belt;
• add parts on the conveyor belt which will assist the process of picking up balls (the easiest option is long pins).

If you have any problems or the students find it difficult to build their robots, check the instructions below.

In this tutorial we introduce the basic algorithm for following a line with one sensor and review the algorithm for quickly followwing a black line with one sensor, implementing both with the Mindstorms EV3 robotics kit.