Climbing Simulator
- D3.js
- SCSS
Problem
This tiny project is an interactive tool to help high school students solve a particular physics problem. In the 2019 FIRST Robotics Competition, one of the challenges was to hang three robots on a single see-saw-like bar. On the day the challenge was released, competitors and engineers had to make decisions about the constraints of their robot: where it would hang, how it would connect with the bar, and how it would cooperate with its teammates. Many of these decisions hinged on how the bar would react to the robot’s weight.
Solution
In order to help make these decisions, I built a physics simulation in Javascript to simulate 1-3 robots hanging on the bar from different positions, and calculated its resultant position, and whether it was within the margin to score points according to the game manual.
Outcomes
Many teams used the simulator in the first several days of design and build, before they had access to a physical model of the game piece, to understand the constraints of their problem. It was positively reviewed, and a helpful mentor contributed some code to implement a feature he was interested in. It was particularly helpful to build this project quickly as the teams needed to experiment right away to start their design process–in this competition, design and build time is limited. My tool gave teams that used it a head start.