Aligning to a wall with a competition robot

In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to square on a wall. The process requires the robot to crash into the wall, or another solid object on the field, and to "stick" on it. If the robot was to an angle to the wall, the final result of that crush will be that the robot is now fully perpendicular to the wall. As we say in competitions - the robot has squared or aligned itself.

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08 Jul 2019
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How to square on a wall

You need an attachment in the shape of a wall so that your robot can square itself to a wall. You also need a move motor block set to seconds.
Move for seconds is required because that prevents motors from stalling. With rotations or degrees, the program will not continue to the next block if the motor can't execute the command. With seconds, the program will continue to the next block when the given time elapses.

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Using unlimited movement (aka ON) is also unacceptable because it requires sensor and that means that we must increase the of the robot and of the program.

Most of the times you need 100% power forward for about one second. The goal is to place the robot next to the wall, without spending too many seconds doing so.

Video Demonstration

Align to walls with Box Robot Two

Wall align with NXT

Courses and lessons with this Tutorial

This Tutorial is used in the following courses and lessons

FLLCasts Off-season Challenge with LEGO Mindstorms EV3

The FLL season is great, but has one disadvantage - it ends. We have prepared that course for those of you that does not want to stop! The course presents a whole new challenge with custom designed field and mission models, that can be built from just 2 LEGO Mindstorms EV3 sets (core+resource). It is a great way to keep the momentum going after the end of the FLL season and prepare in the best way possible for the next.

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Navigation on the field using the walls

Introduction

In the section Navigation without sensors, we already evaluated that the robot is not very consistent with its positioning on the field. In this section, we will learn how to square the robot to walls or solid objects on the field and remove some of the errors that have occurred during the maneuvers up to that point.