Design Brief

Task

This is the final project for the Minds & Machines course at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (IHSS-1964). It involves building a small robot out of LEGO blocks, electric motors, and a programmed microcontroller. The program must be generated by the group.

The Wumpus World

An Example Wumpus World

The Wumpus World is a 4×4 grid about the robot can move. Each square of the grid may contain a pit, a wumpus, or gold. The goal is for the robot to find the gold and safely return to it home square, while using information it gathers to avoid dangers.

Pits:

  • There may be up to 8 pits
  • The robot will get a “breezy” from a pit in an adjacent square
  • If the robot enters a square with a pit it will fall in and die

The Wumpus:

  • There will only be 1 wumpus
  • The robot will get a “smelly” signal from a wumpus in an adjacent square
  • If the robot enters the square with the wumpus it will be killed
  • The robot has one arrow which it can kill the wumpus with

Gold:

  • The robot will get a “glittery” signal if there is gold in an adjacent square
  • When the robot enters the square with the gold it picks it up and then should return home

A resource page is provided on the course website. The “Wumpus World” scenario is explored in-depth here.

Group Members

Kenneth King

Kenneth wrote the algorithm and helped Paul describe it on the Method page.

Cori Lutz

Cori noted our progress each day and wrote it in the website’s Daily Work Log. She also helped edit the Discussion of Our Robot’s Mind and the Performance Roundup. Cori also recorded the videos of the robot’s performance.

Paul Noon

Paul authored the Discussion of Our Robot’s Mind and our Design Brief. He also edited Cori’s videos and uploaded them to YouTube so they could be linked from this website. Paul built most of the LEGO parts of the robot himself while considering the rest of the group’s input.

Theo Pak

Theo developed, tested, and implemented the motor driver circuit as described here so that the Arduino microcontroller could be used in place of the Handy Board platform. He also wrote a library that allows the motors to be controlled by the Arduino using simple, high-level code– eg, “robot.go(“N”);” makes the robot turn appropriately and then travel one block north. An additional library for light sensors was started, but never implemented. Theo also setup the back-end of this website (including hosting) and created the front-end (WordPress theme), which is open source.

Bonus Group Member: Alex Kau (Group 5.2) Although Alex was part of a different group, he worked with Theo to make the Arduino microcontroller useful. Alex contributed code to make the robot recieve IR signals, and Theo gave him code for the movement library. No other code was shared. Alex and Theo did not collaborate on the decision-making algorithms of their respective groups.