Towards a Killer Robot Army: Part 2

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cognitive, lego, maze, mindstorms, robots

My diabolical plans move on apace; a new generation of infernal contraptions has sprung from the twisted machinations of my technologickal laboratory. No longer fully a slave to it’s programming, the newest addition to my mechanical throng can truly be said to be an automaton.

This most recent task in my COGS lab was once again to traverse a maze, but this time without pre-programming the route. Rather, using just two light sensors, our task was to create a vehicle capable of finding it’s own way – officially called Agent-Environment Interaction. This was a much more rewarding task than the previous Internal Representation lab…

Towards a Killer Robot Army: Part 1

Tags

lego, maze, mindstorms, robots

Cognitive Systems has thus far been quite good; I love the Computer Science classes, and the philosophical issues we discuss are intriguing. But it wasn’t until this year that we really started down the path which most interests me: the construction of the remorseless mechanical slave-soldiers which will one day form the cruel, unfeeling fist of my tyrannical oligarchy. It should be stated that we have started at the very beginning of that path; the robots we are currently building in COGS 300 are several generations removed from the final (diabolical) product. But it is a start none-the-less.

The labs are really great. We’re in groups of three and we have two or three weeks to complete the robot, after which we compete with the other groups. Those rankings determines the order in which groups pick debate topics, so it gets quite competitive.

For the first lab, we had to build a bot which would find the light-source an approach it….