Tractor Pull

The tractor pull challenge is a test of strength instead of speed. The test is to see which robot can pull the most weight 50cm in the least amount of time. To do this we will need to reverse the gears on our robot due to the fact that right now they are set up for speed, not strength. To get the proper gear ratio for strength, our robot needs a larger driven gear (the one connected to the wheel) than the driving gear. This will cause the robot to move at a steady rate, but be able to pull a lot of weight.

Drag Race Challenge

The drag race challenge is a test of speed. We want to construct a robot that will be the fastest in a 3 meter race. To do this we will need to rebuild our NXT to accommodate larger gears. Once we have built the robot in a way that allows us to use large gears we can put together a set of gears (large driving and small driven) to move our NXT as fast as possible over a distance of 3 meters. I don't think the initial building or programming will be hard, but I'm not sure if we can win, I'm sure other people in our class will find ways to make their robots move incredibly fast.

Gears and Speed Investigation

In the gears and speed investigation we had to decide between two hypotheses as to which one more accurately calculates the distance that the robot will move due to its gear ratio. To do this we measure the distance the robot traveled three times, we repeated this process with a few different gear ratios. We then averaged the distances to decrease the error created during the experiment.
We then used the distances and gear ratios and using the two hypotheses to predict the speed at which the robots moves. We then compared the predicted values with the actual value and decided which of the hypotheses worked best.

We discovered that the hypothesis that works best is Hypothesis B.