C - Exploring the Planet

Your robot should be setup in the same way as the previous section!

Make sure the magnet module is still attached.

Don't forget that the left motor should be plugged into M1, and the right motor into M2!

Turning a car is easy - you can just rotate the wheels!

However the wheels on most robots are fixed, so we have to do something different.

Fixed wheel machines steer using 'skid steering' - exactly the same way as a tank! You might have also seen small diggers that have 4 fixed wheels steering like this as well.

Skid steering is easy - you just increase or decrease the speed of one wheel, and the robot will turn!

Create a simple program to make your robot drive forwards, but use 2 separate motor blocks, 1 for each wheel.

Now change the speed of one of the wheels, and upload your code.

Which way do you think the robot will turn? How can you make it turn faster? Experiment and find out for yourself!

Let's use what we've learned to pickup the stranded astronaut again.

This time, pickup the astronaut by driving your robot around the outside of the planet! Try and stay as close as you can to the edge.

You may have worked this out already, but we can actually make our robot spin on the spot if we want to!

Try making one motor go forwards at 100%, and the other backwards at 100%. Your robot should spin on the spot!

Now we can turn the robot, let's pick up the astronaut by driving across the planet, but come back facing forwards!

Write a program to go and pick up the astronaut, turn on the spot and drive back to base going forwards.