Problems with the Hatchlings (Baby Phoenixes)
• Making them go in a straight line
• Making them all start after the IR signal
• Making the robots go back to the same place
• Reliability
• Making all of the hatchlings the same
It took a very long time to build all of the hatchlings so that they were the same shape and size as each other. It was hard to find enough of the same types of bricks and motors to go on each of the 4 hatchlings. Also, sensors could have been plugged into the wrong input port. We had to keep rebuilding the robots again and again until they were all identical. This took up quite a lot of time. To make sure that all of the hatchlings were the same, we had to check them individually.
The hatchlings went very wonky when they were meant to be going in a simple straight line. This was a problem because it meant that they could bump into each other, or leave the assigned area. To fix this problem, we attached the wheel axels together so that the hatchlings could not go in any direction other than straight.
As there is only one IR starter robot, and several robots for it to start, sometimes it did not reach all of the hatchlings and sometimes one or two of them would not have started. There was no easy way to solve this problem, but after pressing the button, if the IR robot is waved around, the hatchlings are more likely to start.
At various points of the dance, we wanted the hatchlings to go back to the place where they originally started. We wanted them to do this because if they went back to where they started, they wouldn’t go too far forward, and bump into the robot opposite them. We solved this problem by building in a rotation sensor that made the hatchlings go back to where they started when we wanted them to.
Quite often, we found that one of the four hatchlings wasn’t working, for various reasons, and we found that the hatchling robots were very unreliable. The only way to improve the reliability of the robots was to make sure that the program was as good as it could be, and to check each robot individually before performances.
