The Parallax Board of Education Robot

The Parallax Board of Education (Robot Boe-Bot) is a simple robot made from a Parallax Board of Education (BoE) mounted on an aluminum frame to which two Futaba hobby servos are mounted. These servos have been modified to provide continuous motion and have several speeds at which they will turn. The BoE-Bot contains a small solderless prototyping board on which several experiments can be done. In order to realize the fascinating potential the BoE-Bot has to demonstrate the robotic behaviors.

The Linear Execution vs. Concurrent Execution and the Finite State Machine In a program, each statement is executed in sequential order, the next statement can not start until the last one is d one. When there is only one thread of logic running, this means that the program proceeds in a linear fashion, from start to finish. Concurrent execution is when there is more than one logic running thread at what appears to be the same time. "How do I do that?” you may ask. In the Parallax Basic Stamp processor you can do this by using the independent sections of code, called modules or in our case, subroutines that will be called many times before their function is completed.

In order to do that, you will need to keep the track of where you are in your subroutine so that you know where to start up again when you return. One very good way to do this is called the Finite State Machine or FSM for short. Because there are only a few different actions you want your subroutine to execute, and it does actually complete its job at some point, it is a finite list. There are several forms of the FSMs, this type of the FSM is a hybrid we will use specifically for the robotic programming.

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