
Re: Battery and Performance?
Depending on how the robot is programmed, battery life can have a definite impact on the robot's performance. This is especially true if the program contains 'move for time' commands:
The reason for this is that the motor[] commands tell the NXT to send a certain
power level (not speed value) to the motors. Without going too much into the math behind the numbers, as the battery charge drops the amount of available 'power' that can be sent to the motors drops as well. Thus, you will see a difference in performance between a fresh, newly charged battery and a battery that has been used for a couple of hours.
The best way to circumvent this is to use the NXT motor's built-in encoders to control how many rotations the motors have traveled. These encoders have the advantage of returning the same amount of 'ticks' per revolution no matter what speed or power level the motors are running at. To learn more about the NXT's motors and their built-in encoders, take a look at
our wiki page on the subject.Also, I would suggest taking a look through
our video curriculum trainer. It walks you through pretty much everything I've just gone over, plus it can help you learn about programming motors and sensors for the NXT in ROBOTC.
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