The first year of the TAFE Diploma I had to design and build a small robot to navigate through a maze.
Firstly I had to use AutoCAD to make drawings of the robot and all its components.
After getting down the drawings I then had to write a program to cut the base of the robot on the small CNC mill at the Tafe.
I had to buy all the components and put them all together.
I wanted to use a Sanyo IR sensor mounted on a servo to scan left and right as the primary sensor.
The robot was to approach the wall, the servo then scanned left and right and a turn was made to which ever side had the greatest distance.
In theory this sounded good, but in practise this method proved very slow and very hard to write a program that ran the robot with any success, as the robot just kept turning to the greatest distance, which meant that the robot drove around and around in circles, most of the time not getting out of the maze.
Another plan of attack was needed, so I mounted another IR sensor to front of the robot and just use the servo to stay left or right depending on the wall I wanted to follow.
The only other mechanical problem I had was the motor controller IC getting very hot, this seemed to cause the IC to run in a protection modeand cause the motors to run slow and sometimes stop all together.
The robot started to work well and after some further fine tuning of my program it started to be able to get to the end of the maze.
