Scooter!

One of our recent robotics projects was to design a practical robot. One student made a scooter that he could ride around on using our Lego & Tetrix parts. (If you're super anxious to see the video, just skip to the bottom.)

We had never programmed from scratch in LabView before, but we had to figure it out for this project. We watched several YouTube video tutorials, read some tutorials online & played around in the software. The programming took about two weeks.

Our robot has 4 motors. The left motors are connected to a touch sensor, so that when you press it, both wheels on the left side move. The right side is configured the same way, to a separate touch sensor. Each side of the scooter is placed into a continuous loop so that it works until you turn the scooter off. Then, those loops are placed inside a larger loop.

In the world of programming, this isn't very complicated, but we had never worked in this interface before, and it was frustrating at times, but very rewarding in the end. As it turned out, all we needed to adjust was our loops to make it work from our original programming.

And here it is in action!