In partial fulfillment of the senior project requirement for graduation at BYU, Doug Jones, David Landon and Aaron Smith designed and built the robot depicted above. To make things a little more interesting, another group built their own robot and we let the robots compete against each other to see which one could solve a maze most quickly. Ours won. This page has been written to give you an idea of what we did to solve a number of specific problems and give you a headstart designing your own robots.
The Autonomous Line-Tracking, Maze-Solving Robot is a small car-like vehicle which tracks a specially-designed maze laid out in black tape on a light-colored floor. The vehicle was required to be completely autonomous from the start of the maze to the finish, and to complete the maze in under 10 minutes. A contest was held among the teams to complete the maze in the least time possible. The Line-Tracking Robot was a vehicle designed for a single purpose, i.e. to win the contest.
The contest was to design and build an autonomous robitic vehicle capable of solving a maze laid out in electrical tape on a light-colored tile floor. The maze could have included an arbitrary number of branches which came off at 90-degree angles, and any dead ends are terminated with large obstacles. None of the curves were to have a radius less than one foot. Official specifications. (pdf format)
The object was to successfully complete the maze in less time than that required by the competing team. See our Contest page for a picture of the maze.
We optically sensed the position of the electrical tape maze, the presence of side branches, and the presence of obstacles. The brains of the control consisted of a Miniboard from MIT, using the Motorola 68HC11E2FN microcontroller. We used PD control to center the robot over the track.
