Building Robots with LEGO® Mindstorms® NXT

Chapter 12. Doing the Math

Solutions in this chapter:

• Multiplying and Dividing

• Averaging Data

• Using Interpolation

• Understanding Hysteresis

• Higher Math

Introduction

You may be surprised to find a chapter about mathematics in a book aimed at explaining building techniques. However, just as we can’t put programming aside totally, so too we cannot neglect an introduction to some basic mathematical techniques. As we’ve explained, robotics involves many different disciplines, and it’s almost impossible to design a robot without considering its programming issues together with the mechanical aspects. For this reason, some of the projects we are going to describe in this book include sample code, and we want to provide here the basic foundations for the math ...