Projects
In this chapter we describe the back story for our projects in a little detail.
Nadezhda
This projects aims to model a simple robotic cockroach. The cockroach moves along a line. Each turn it either takes a step forward, takes a step backwards, or stops.
The goal of the cockroach is to reach a supply of food somewhere along the line. Its performance is measured by the distance to the food source.
Moonlander
This is the ultimate project. The goal for this project is to safely land a lander on the surface of the moon. We are modeling the control program of the lander. Each decision moment the program can decide to do the following things
- Skip, does nothing
- Left, fires some positioning blasters that will increase the rotational speed to the left.
- Right, does something similar as Left, only to the right.
- Thrust, fire the main thruster, changing the velocity of the lander.
You will be able to work on specific, characteristic problems applying what you learned in the Nadezhda project.
AGC
In this project we are modeling doing calculations with a single variable. One example would be \(3x + 5\).
The goal is to match a series of function values as closely as possible. This project is one that you could try to implement yourself, guided by exercises in this book.