Line Following March 2010
by Jef Mangelschots
It was time again to dust off the old line following robot. In contrast to previous years, somebody actually took the effort to bring white underground tiles. No more black electrical tape on dirty grey linoleum floor. Too easy! I kind of miss the old days where robot's line detection sensors got confused on the non-ideal contrast ratio and decided to go out for a walk on their own. Talking about true autonomy: a robot deciding on its own to go out for a walk. Now that is a good story to cover up the fact that you actually don't know what you are doing.
First to enter was Bill Douglas. His bot comes with an interesting story. One that Bill was all too eager to tell while sporting a grin from ear to ear. A recent trip to Sin City has left him with an extra $100 he did not want to hand over to his wife, so he bought the 3pi bot from (surprise surprise) Las Vegas based Pololu. So he christened his bot "IllGottenGains" He even went so far to tweak the PID control algorithm in the standard line following software that comes with the bot to give it that extra oomph. Now that blew my mind because Bill is a hardware guy and I always thought that it was impossible for them to comprehend software. So Bill has gone come over from the the dark side to join the software Jedi's to battle evil. So Bill got a very well deserved 1st place. And that got him some more goodies: a special Circuit Cellar issue on robots, a full Roborealm license AND a Solarbotics Arduino experimenter kit, all donated to us by their vendors. Check out more of our donated prizes here. You can win one of them too.
Off course it also helped that his batteries were better charged than mine, which was kind of ... embarrassing. So there is not much to tell about my robot. I came with the same 3pi. Good thing we weren't 14 year old girls arriving at the party with exactly the same blouse, because that would have been really embarrassing. I actually didn't bother to upgrade the stock software (in my defense, I only got the robot back from Pololu the night before. They replaced the processor because I lobotomized the poor thing, but that is another - embarrassing - story). As I learned, using the same budget batteries that I have been using for a while is not a good idea if you are competing in an endurance contest. My 3pi wasn't exactly the Energizer Bunny and deflated like a mortgage backed security in 2008.
Jim Uberzetsig had more luck with his Yellow Banana. To be honest I don't know much about it. It looks like the robot base the RSSC club made as a group project a number of years ago. Jim, if you want more detail about your robot in this article, you got to let me know more details.
1st place winner: Bill Douglas
2nd place: Jim Ubersetzig
3rd place: Jef Mangelschots
the contestants:
prizes
Our brave competitors went home with a complementary issue of Circuit Cellar, specially dedicated to robotics, and a full version of RoboRealm vision software.
On top of that, the first prize winner, Bill Douglas went home with the Arduino Experimenter kit from Solarbotics.
The club has many more great prizes to hand out to any competitor, brave enough to show up with a bot. You don't even have to be a regular member. It pays to compete. Find out more about our prizes here.
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