My aim is to produce a line follower robot with a bump sensor Essay

My aim is to produce a line follower robot with a bump sensor which can reverse if it goes off course. Research: Line follower robots are most commonly produced to take part in competitions. The purpose of the line follower robot is to follow a line. The robot will only follow a line that is black against a white background or a white line against a black background. This is so that the sensors can distinguish a clear difference in light and so the robot can trace and follow the line. From my research I have decided to use infrared LED emitters (phototransistors). They are fairly cheap but work relatively well. To research into the project I was going to make I looked on the internet to find other examples of the line follower robots. I found many different variations and concentrated on the components used. I looked into books and gathered information on how to assemble the circuit on the breadboard and researched on how the components work. I have researched on the type of amplifiers I could use for the line follower. I will use an amplifier to increase the current as I am using low voltage. I looked on the Maplins website (www.maplins.co.uk) and decided to use the LM386 because it is suitable for low voltage applications and it is relatively cheap. Specification: * The robot has to be able to follow straight lines, curves and turn around corners * It has to follow a black line that is against a white background * It must work using one 9V battery * The robot must be able to reverse from any obstacle it hits * It should be able to function on its own (No help needed to guide it) * It should be small and light, easy to move and pick up if veered off course. * Should indicate what direction it will turn Generation of possible solutions: I could use 2 light dependant resistors to detect the difference in light reflected from the line. It would react quite slowly I could use two phototransistors which emit infrared beams onto the line. When less light is detected on the phototransistors there is less resistance thus allowing the motors to move. Sub-system development: My circuit had two designs combined. First is the line follower, which detects light and moves according to the line, and the other part is a bump sensor which when it stumbles across an obstacle it reverses, this is ... ...llowed the light. I also used an ammeter to check the current passing through the circuit. This confirmed that my circuit was working correctly. When I covered the phototransistors the there was around 0.4 A passing through. However, when I applied light onto the phototransistors (using an ordinary LED) I noticed that the reading on the ammeter was 8.6 A. this proves my theory that covering the phototransistors, it increases the resistance. Evaluation: My circuit works well and follows my specification. The motors move forward when light is placed and it and slow down when no light is present on the phototransistors. * Robot has the ability to move in s straight line, around curves and turn corners. * With the photo transistors it can follow a black line against a white background. * It works using a 9V battery * It has a relay which reverses the direction of the motors turning so it can move away from obstacles * It doesn’t require anyone to move it or guide it using a remote control. * It is light and easy to move so when it goes of course I am able to put it back on the line * Has two LEDs which indicate what direction it is turning

Are Parents Really to Blame for Their Kids’ Behavior?

Vanessa Olson Mrs. Novak September 17, 2012 Final Draft Are Parents Really to Blame for Their Kids’ Behavior? Watching how children, or even teenagers my age, act, I wonder how or why their parents let them get away with their behavior. What causes some kids to talk disrespectful to others or throw temper tantrums for the littlest reasons? My parents would tell me how, when they were my age, no one acted out like how children do today; that parents do not have the morals or values that the earlier generations have.After all, I personally would never allow my children to act in such ways. I started to research if parents were really to blame for the way their children act, or if kids act in their own ways no matter how their parents raised them. At first I searched through Google to see if I could find articles debating whether parents were really to blame for how their children behave. Most of the results came out to be that parents were responsible and that children acting ou t is usually because there is little discipline at home.I was not satisfied with only these results; I felt that there are exceptions to how children behave that are not solely in result of how they were raised by their parents. School, location, ethnicity, age, and religious factors all influence how we behave. Children are like sponges-they model everything a parent does and incorporate what they see into their own lives (Erikson 5). Reading this article, I was almost convinced that parents were actually really the main reason for children to act in the ways they do.After all, negative examples can be unhealthy as a child will mimic these and lead them to bad behavior. I continued to read on what types of factors would influence negative behavior. I found out social skills, stress, discipline, fighting, and child abuse are all major factors that children are exposed to that result in their behavior. Social skills, such as a simple â€Å"please† or â€Å"thank you†, c an be positively influential to kids; they will model what they witness their parents doing.According to the website More4Kids info, a parent’s reaction to stress affects the way a child reacts to stress (Erickson 6). If they believe they are the reason for yelling or lashing out, the child will sometimes shut him or herself down. Discipline, such as spanking or physically harming one’s child, does not teach that child how to modify their behavior; time-outs are alternate forms of punishment that can change their behavior in a calm manner. Verbal and physical fights are extremely hard on kids.Children may develop low self-esteems and may even behave violently toward other children (Erickson 6). Sometimes when children are abused, they shut down and try to understand why they are getting abused. Reading through this article on how all these factors really influence how children act, I started to believe that mouthy children are the result of bad parenting. Still questio ning if there were any other reasons for children to act out I continued to look at other articles online. According to Oxford University, poor parenting is not the reason for increased problem behavior in kids.They found out that there is no general decline in parenting. Parents and teenagers are choosing to spend more quality time together than in 25 years ago (Oxford 3). The most recent studies show how parents now a-days are more likely to know where they children are compared to what they are doing in the 1980s. I found this information to be particularly surprising because I feel that parents were much stricter in earlier generations then compared to now. The most interesting article I found on who is to blame for children’s behavior is on The New York Times website.Dr. Richard A. Friedman, M. D. , talked about a patient he had that dealt with depression and anxiety due to the fact that her son that had been a generally rude and unkind person his entire life. â€Å"I h ate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people,† said his patient (Friedman 1). When tested, the results came back saying he was in the intellectually superior range and that there was no evidence of any learning disability or mental illness. These same parents raised two other children who were socially and intellectually normal.How do parents raise two other well-behaved children while their other one turned out to be so misbehaved? When I read this, I felt that this was the truth. As I began to read the article Accepting That Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds, part of me agrees with Dr. Friedman; sometimes good parents do have toxic children. Reading multiple articles arguing why parents are to blame for how their children act or how other factors can influence kids, I feel that both are to blame. On one hand, parents are to blame if their kids have no self-control and get away with acting out.But on the other hand, I feel that some kids are just bad kids; the y choose their own path to follow. For better or for worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. This is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame or credit for everything that their children become (Friedman 3). Vanessa Olson Mrs. Novak Annotated Bibliography 22 September 2012 A Selected Annotated Bibliography on Parents Influence on Kids’ Behavior Friedman, Richard A, M. D. Accepting That Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds. 12 July   Ã‚   2010. Web. 13 July 2010. http://www. nytimes. om/2010/07/13/health/13mind. html? _r=0 This article was published in the New York Times and Richard Friedman, M. D. , explains the experience he had with one of his patients. She claimed to be depressed due to her son’s behavior. He talks about how their one son is not a nice person but they managed to raise two other well-adjusted children. I think this article is helpful; it explains how parents are not always the reason for how every child behaves. Also there is information of another set of parents who have been ignored by his son, having no phone calls or e-mails returned.The best part of this article is that it says that not everyone will turn out nice and loving, and that it is not necessarily because of parental behavior or their environment that they grew up in. Erickson, Rose. Parents Effect on Child Behavior. 21 Jan. 2010. Web. 14 Sept. 2012. http://www. livestrong. com/article/75282-parents-effect-child-behavior/ In this article, parents are to blame for how their children act. It states how negative examples from parents have a great effect and can cause children to develop bad behavior. The author gives particular topics in day to day life that influence how one behaves.I think this article is useful because out of all the articles about children’s bad behavior being a result of their parents, this has the best reasons why. I like how she used examples to show how each topic is the cause and that she backs up her statements. Also I like this article because Rose does not use words that exceed the average reading level. Oxford University. Today’s Parents ‘Not to Blame’ for Teenage Problem Behavior. 31 July 2009. Web. 14 Sept. 2012. This website talked about how most people believe that parents are much worse now than they were in earlier generations.It has statistics on how even though most believe it to be the other way around, teenagers and parents are much closer now than in earlier generations. Parents are more likely to know where their kids are and what they are doing. I found this article to be useful because it talks about how there are other factors, such as cell phones, television, and the internet, that can influence one’s actions no matter how they were raised. I like this article mainly because it talks about what most articles do not; the comparison between earlier generations and this current one.

An Example of a Hypothesis Test

Mathematics and statistics are not for spectators. To truly understand what is going on, we should read through and work through several examples. If we know about the ideas behind hypothesis testing and see an overview of the method, then the next step is to see an example. The following shows a worked out example of a hypothesis test.   In looking at this example, we consider two different versions of the same problem. We examine both traditional methods of a test of significance and also the p-value method. A Statement of the Problem Suppose that a doctor claims that those who are 17 years old have an average body temperature that is higher than the commonly accepted average human temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. A simple random statistical sample of 25 people, each of age 17, is selected. The average temperature of the sample is found to be 98.9 degrees.  Further, suppose that we know that the population standard deviation of everyone who is 17 years old is 0.6 degrees. The Null and Alternative Hypotheses The claim being investigated is that the average body temperature of everyone who is 17 years old is greater than 98.6 degrees This corresponds to the statement x 98.6. The negation of this is that the population average is not greater than 98.6 degrees. In other words, the average temperature is less than or equal to 98.6 degrees. In symbols, this is x ≠¤ 98.6. One of these statements must become the null hypothesis, and the other should be the alternative hypothesis. The null hypothesis contains equality. So for the above, the null hypothesis H0 : x 98.6. It is common practice to only state the null hypothesis in terms of an equals sign, and not a greater than or equal to or less than or equal to. The statement that does not contain equality is the alternative hypothesis, or H1 : x 98.6. One or Two Tails? The statement of our problem will determine which kind of test to use. If the alternative hypothesis contains a not equals to sign, then we have a two-tailed test. In the other two cases, when the alternative hypothesis contains a strict inequality, we use a one-tailed test. This is our situation, so we use a one-tailed test. Choice of a Significance Level Here we choose the value of alpha, our significance level. It is typical to let alpha be 0.05 or 0.01. For this example we will use a 5% level, meaning that alpha will be equal to 0.05. Choice of Test Statistic and Distribution Now we need to determine which distribution to use. The sample is from a population that is normally distributed as the bell curve, so we can use the standard normal distribution. A table of z-scores will be necessary. The test statistic is found by the formula for the mean of a sample, rather than the standard deviation we use the standard error of the sample mean. Here n25, which has a square root of 5, so the standard error is 0.6/5 0.12. Our test statistic is z (98.9-98.6)/.12 2.5 Accepting and Rejecting At a 5% significance level, the critical value for a one-tailed test is found from the table of z-scores to be 1.645. This is illustrated in the diagram above. Since the test statistic does fall within the critical region, we reject the null hypothesis. The p-Value Method There is a slight variation if we conduct our test using p-values. Here we see that a z-score of 2.5 has a p-value of 0.0062. Since this is less than the significance level of 0.05, we reject the null hypothesis. Conclusion We conclude by stating the results of our hypothesis test. The statistical evidence shows that either a rare event has occurred, or that the average temperature of those who are 17 years old is, in fact, greater than 98.6 degrees.