Experiment

Problem

When I do my homework at the island in our kitchen, sometimes my pencil falls, and it gets annoying having to always bend down and pick it up, so imagine that the pencil is a ball (which is quite a significant difference in size.) I am going to try to make a Robotic arm, and make it work. My main question is though, is how many attempts to make the arm will it take to be successful.

Hypothesis

I think that it will probably take me aroud 15 to 20 attempts!

Experiment

For my experiment I built a Robotic arm and made it work so that it picks up a ball.

Materials:

*Lego Mindstorms kit

*A computer

*NXT Mindstorms program

The start of the base

To top

An advanced base

Finished base

The start of the arm

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The other part of the arm

The main part of the arm: Finished

The start of the stand for the arm

The stand connected on the arm

The stand connected on the base

NXT Program connected to the arm

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Steps:

1. I used the Mindstorms instructions to build a basic Robotics arm.

2. Then I took it an modified it to my own design.

3. Next using my own methods I built a stand for my arm.

4. After that, I made a stand for the ball.

5. Finally, I programmed my arm to pick up a ball.

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Results:

After a while, and a lot of changes on my arm, I managed to make the arm pick up a ball from the stand and put it back wtihout failure.

Here is a graph of on a scale of ten, how well the arm worked for the number of my attempts.