P1 Exercise 2 - Variables

Ultimately as a robot programmer or any kind of programmer for that matter, the faster you can work with your code, the better. The concept of variables is great in that regard. For example, have a look at the figure 2.1. In that depicted example the robot is programmed to follow a triangular path, where each side of the triangle is equal. Now a variable is introduced for the length of the triangle’s side called distance and also a variable for the triangle’s angles. Through those variables we could easily define a larger triangular path by just changing the value of the distance variable, instead of modifying all the robot.move commands.

In a larger program, one could easily have tens or even hundreds of instances, where a certain value is needed, such as the size of the robot’s wheel. If the robot’s wheel is changed, the programmer could easily modify the code for the new wheel size by just changing the according variable.

Figure. 2.1: An example use of variables. iRobot project code RU8DA