Intergrated Development Project

January - February 2020

A project I did as part of my 2nd year of my degree where we were put into teams of 6 and tasked with constructing a robot to rescue "victims" from a "cave".

(Yes, this was likely inspired by that cave rescue incident)

Teams were split into 3 sub-teams focusing on the mechanical, electronic and programming side of the project. I was assigned to the programming sub-team based off my prior programming experience.

Our robot ended up finishing 1st in the final competition, which I thought was down to:

• Deciding very early on to not use computer vision after hearing that it was often unreliable due to changing light conditions (especially in the final competition with people crowded around the arenas)
• Testing our dead reckoning navigation early with a temporary cardboard chassis, which meant that we had very reliable robot movement after upgrading to the sturdier wooden final chassis
• Using three main line sensors to reliably navigate the junction outside the cave, with debug LEDs which helped distinguish between programming errors and electrical problems
• Using a fourth line sensor far from the wheel axis to give us a large margin of error when returning to the cave entrance