Building Robots With Lego Mindstorms

218 Chapter 12 • Doing the Math

Averaging Data

There are situations when you may prefer that your robot base its decisions not

on a single sensor reading but on a group of them, to achieve more stable

behavior. For example, if your robot has to navigate a pad made up of colored

areas rather than just black and white, you would want it to change its route only

when it finds a different color, ignoring transition areas between two adjacent

colors (or even dirt particles that could be “read” by accident).

Another case is when you want to measure ambient light, ignoring strong

lights and shadows. Averaging provides a simple way to solve these problems.

Simple ...