Debriefing
Performance
Overall, MouseKraft performed up to expectations. It was able to find both
the dim as well as the bright house as well was able to maneuver the
corridor system with great ease due to our simple, yet suffice
navigation/detection system. Unfortunately, it was disappointing that, due
to uncontrollable fluctuations in light brightness levels being displayed
on the appropriate homes, in order to have an acceptable success rate in
finding the appropriate home, extremely precise calibration was needed.
Possibly, in future attempts, one should account for human error when
calibrating brightness levels by possibly adding a larger error term to the
calibration step.
Robustness
The physical robustness of KraftMouse was quite admirable. Due to its
simplistic design with minimal parts, KraftMouse was virtually
indestructible, except for its flimsy bumpers. A problem we found with our
design was that when KraftMouse was close to an obstruction on the side of
it, the wheel would often get jammed on the wall. We corrected this problem
with the use of bumpers at 45 degrees on the front of KraftMouse, but due
to limitations with Lego, this 45 degree orientation was not structurally
sound and would continuously need to be corrected after nearly every
collision, but it did perform it's duty of preventing wheel sticking.
Limitations
As mentioned earlier, a limitation in our design was that extreme care was
needed when calibrating KraftMouse.