DOES PROGRAMMING A ROBOT WITH CHATGPT WORK AT ALL?

Since ChatGPT became available online, it has been used for all sorts of silly things. It put its coding chops to work programming a circular saw to see if it was any good. I apologize for the pun.

We aimed to build a robotic lawn edging machine carrying a circular saw. In addition to the blade, the circular saw itself has no safety features. RC cars use rack and pinions to control their position. The unit is mounted on the front of a small RC car. Here is some advice from [Engineering After Hours]: don’t do this on your own.

Engineering After Hours ChatGPT

The ChatGPT was not only able to advise [Engineering After Hours] on which parts were needed, but it could also explain how to connect everything to an Arduino and write the code. AI language model even recommended controlling the circular saw using a PID loop. It was messy in the beginning, but some refinements made it impressively functional.

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AI-programmed by ChatGPT

This robot performs pretty poorly as a line follower. Despite this, it does a pretty good job as an AI-programmed robot. To get everything working, [Engineering After Hours] had to make several corrections to the code to deal with the AI, and it’s hard to say how much help it had. Nevertheless, the possibility of this kind of project shows that AI has come a long way.