Robotics With Miss Chowfin

This year in robotics we were to make a buggy that we would send to mars. We used different robots and robotics to make our mars lander be able to stand mars conditions which is why we had to do loads to design it on our robotics journey.

To make a start on our mars lander design we had to see what the buggy was up against. We found out that mars is the fourth planet from the sun. Due to the rusty iron in the ground causing the red colour of the planet it got its nickname the red planet. Mars is mainly a rocky terrain with many craters and gullies. Also dunes and wind are a big threat to our mars lander luckily we built our mars lander to work with all these different obstacles.

After we found the information we needed we needed to see which one of the 3 robots was best for us to use. The first robot we used was the Sphero you control it using a iPad it was kind of hard to control. I really enjoyed using it because of the fact of the spherical shape which meant it wouldn't tip over and in mars with all the rocky terrains it would be very useful. The next robot was the Ozobot which was a small robot who traveled on ink that came from a special pen it was really fun to use. The last one is the Edison a robot that is controlled by coding the Edison was really hard to use and did nothing it was very useless to use.

Our prototype was a paper box with pipe cleaners and straws I thought it was really good as the magnets on the bottom allowed it to tip over to the correct side which as I said about the Sphero is very useful. Our buggy has a mini rocket to send samples to earth a digger to dig up samples its side windows allow camera angles. We also have a 360 degree camera on top for better views.

We built it out of Lego so we could see what it would look like and clipped it to the Edison.