Robot That Walks Lines

Ozobot is a minia­ture robot, which, how­ev­er, can do a lot. The main “hype” around him arose from the way the robot is con­trolled: the child sim­ply draws lines in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, and the robot walks along them. And, nev­er­the­less, every­thing is not so sim­ple and one-sided. I will briefly talk about it.

The Ozobot robot is pre­sent­ed in two ver­sions: Bit and Evo.

The sec­ond ver­sion (Evo) is more advanced in terms of per­for­mance (there is a sound­track here) and con­trol capa­bil­i­ties (there is Blue­tooth here, so you can “steer” the robot using your smart­phone).

How­ev­er, the con­trol func­tion from a smart­phone in rela­tion to this gad­get is com­plete­ly unin­ter­est­ing: the main fea­ture of Ozobots is that they can walk along the lines of the mark­er.

We will talk about the younger mod­el — Ozobot Bit. This is a com­pact, one might even say, minia­ture bot, the size of which is slight­ly larg­er than a pen­ny:

Below — there are just pho­to­sen­sors that are respon­si­ble for rec­og­niz­ing the col­ors and lines along which the robot moves. He does it with wheels.

Here, on the side, you can see the only con­trol but­ton that turns the Bit on and off, and also enters it by hold­ing it into the cal­i­bra­tion mode.

The robot is made of trans­par­ent plas­tic, which should prob­a­bly inter­est the child: scarves and diodes turn the Ozobot mod­el into minia­ture aliens!

On the back of the Ozobot there is a charg­ing con­nec­tor.

In fact, Ozobot can be “dressed up”. The Bit robot comes with a whole set for cus­tomiza­tion: in addi­tion to two sil­i­cone cas­es.

There are quite a few tools made of card­board and stick­ers: hats, ears, eyes, and so on and so forth.

It’s both fun­ny and use­ful. For exam­ple, in videos on Youtube, Ozobot is pre­sent­ed as a tool for play­ing togeth­er, and if there are a lot of robots on the play­ground, then not to lose yours is the only chance by dress­ing up the device.

The com­plete set of Ozobot Bit is quite rich: these are numer­ous edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als, log­i­cal and cre­ative tasks, stick­ers with col­or codes, mark­ers. All this can be used both for train­ing and for play­ing with Ozobot.

Chip with markers

The robot must walk along the lines, and they can be drawn in any col­or — the task of Ozobot is to dis­tin­guish between these col­ors and change the diode sig­nal depend­ing on which col­or line it is cur­rent­ly mov­ing along.

The lines must be drawn accord­ing to a spe­cif­ic exam­ple, how­ev­er, all this infor­ma­tion is kind­ly attached with the robot. The sec­ond pur­pose of the mark­ers is to cre­ate col­or codes for the robot. Ozobot is pro­grammed for cer­tain actions: turns, zigza­gs, etc., and in order to call them, you need to give him a sig­nal.

Sim­i­lar stick­ers are already attached to the accom­pa­ny­ing Ozobot Bit mate­ri­als so that you can prac­tice using them on print­ed work­sheets:

But for more com­plex indi­vid­ual sce­nar­ios, you just need mark­ers. More­over, not nec­es­sar­i­ly com­plete — there are no tricks here. Chil­dren have a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate always dif­fer­ent indi­vid­ual sce­nar­ios of the game.

More­over, you can con­trol the robot and change the rules right on the go!

PC and Applications

The absence of Blue­tooth does not mean the absence of the abil­i­ty to work with mobile devices: in the appli­ca­tion, the child is wait­ing for a play­ground.

Sev­er­al games for luck. Accord­ing to the plot of each of them, Bit is installed on the field and, by click­ing on the start, it must ran­dom­ly choose which of the play­ers it will go to.

Dis­co game and log­ic game. Accord­ing to the plot of the last Bit, you need to take it out of the maze by sub­sti­tut­ing squares with turn lines for it.

A spe­cial site for pro­gram­ming — “Ozoblok­li” — is also of val­ue. Here, the robot will have to cre­ate algo­rithms that it will then exe­cute.

The work con­sists of sev­er­al stages: first, you need to cre­ate an algo­rithm. To do this, first you need to select the desired robot from the top left:

The next step is to cre­ate and group com­mands for Bit. In total there are five lev­els from sim­ple to com­plex, on each of which move­ments for the robot can be set dif­fer­ent­ly.

For each item, task, action, you can open hints on the right.

After every­thing is pro­grammed, the task must be trans­ferred to Bit. It also hap­pens in a rather curi­ous way.

To get start­ed, the robot needs to call the Flash­ing menu and cal­i­brate the Bit:

• Press and hold the but­ton until the light sig­nal
• Bring to a spe­cial field on the screen
• Wait for the green sig­nal that the cal­i­bra­tion is com­plete

After that, the robot will need to be turned on again by press­ing the but­ton once, and then press­ing “Load Bit” with­out remov­ing the robot from the dis­play. If the process is cor­rect, the robot will flash green. With a red sig­nal on Bit, you have to redo every­thing.

In order for the robot to repro­duce the down­loaded actions, it will be nec­es­sary to quick­ly press the pow­er but­ton twice.

Ozobot Bit — what is the result?

Both me and the chil­dren found the Ozobot Bit robot to be fun­ny, and the impres­sions from the test remained pos­i­tive. Hand on heart, to say that we were reluc­tant to per­form com­plex tasks with him, such as pro­gram­ming, cod­ing, and to the extent that. Work­ing with the appli­ca­tion in its log­i­cal part is quite jus­ti­fied.

But what real­ly evokes child­like emo­tions is the chaot­ic process of draw­ing and watch­ing the robot fol­low its intend­ed path, con­stant­ly chang­ing tasks and set­ting new require­ments. The sheets were exhaust­ed, to put it mild­ly, fair­ly. The beau­ty of the toy is that it is always dif­fer­ent, always unique and unpre­dictable.