Line Follower

All Japan Micromouse 2009 Monday

Finals day! I really expected to be nothing more than a spectator today so I was pretty excited about the fact that I would be able to run in the finals. No matter what happened, I felt that was a bit of an achievement. Apart from any nervousness, this was a fairly relaxed day. We could concentrate on watching the other contests as they were being run one after another. First up was the robotrace line follower contest...

Bob's second outing

IMG_3259

Bob has had a bit of minor surgery. I replaced the Darlington transistor motor driver with a L293D chip. Thing is, I forgot that the 293 has relatively large losses so Bob was much slower...

Line Follower First run

IMG_3259 All the bits are together and the processor code tested. Bob should know when he is on track and how far out he is when he is off track. Time to get him running on the test track...

Line Follower Sensors Setup

IMG_3258With the sensors installed and the robot pretty well complete, it is time to see if they can actually do the job they were designed for. the idea is that the line of sensors will be able to measure the robots offset from the centre of the line over as wide a range as possible.

Line Follower Test Track

IMG_3257 You can't build a line follower without a test track to run it on. The proposed UK rules for this competition specify the track to be on a 300mm grid with fixed turn radii of 150mm. Well, I don't have room for that and I don't want to make tiles either so a little lateral thinking is called for...