Engineering Project, would love some guidance!

Community General Discussions
1

Hello Robotshop! I’ve come to what looks like your pretty awesome community for help on a mechanical engineering project. My name is Leo, I’ve just been assigned my first robotics project, and I’m a little overwhelmed. Having dealt in only mindstorms and basic arduino coding before, my experience is unfortunately lacking in robotics so far.

Our project requires an autonomous vehicle to travel along a raised platform with gentle curves of unknown location and then turn around at the end and retrace it’s steps, all without falling off. The platform is about 1 foot wide, and there’s to be no “clamping along the sides”–the robot must be guided through sensors or other methods.

I’ve done a little research on sensors so far, but do any obvious solutions come to your more cultivated minds? Would it be better to use a bang-bang approach, correcting only when the robot approaches the edge, or a more proportional control system such as keeping the edges equidistant from the robot’s centre? How might the robot distinguish the end of the track as opposed to the curves?

Thanks in advance for your help! Regards,

-Leo

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Thanks a bunch! That’s a really good idea! It is indeed a drop to end the path. I’ll return to this thread with any more specific questions we come across :slight_smile:

-Leora

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You can treat it like a line following project, but instead of a black line with white sides, it’s a solid surface with drops on either side. You can use a few downward facing IR sensors to give you distance, and program the robot to correct the path accordingly. How does the path end? If it’s also a drop, then use another downward facing IR sensor at the front; if it’s a wall, then place the sensor horizontally.