Conception vs Perception

There was this tech fest at the Govt. Engineering College, Thrissur named  Dyuthi  held in the month of September last year. Since Thrissur is just a couple of hours away, I hopped into a train, with my friends Leo  and Nabeel. The plan was to participate in a "Line Follower" event and Leo's team also took part in the Robo-Wars. I had already experimented with line followers at home. Here's a video of my first attempt. Tracey acts crazy after some time, gets away from the line, then goes round n round in circles, desperate to get back on to the line. A day before the tech fest I changed the cardboard base to a plastic one which Leo had. But in my hurry I didn't do a test run nor did I improve the code. RESULT : Miserable failure!!! In the above video, Tracey follows the line, at least for a short time. But she refused to budge at the event. The code is just full of rubbish, so I wont share it now. Maybe I'll tweak Tracey ...

Make sure you read the previous post . As i mentioned in the previous post, Wally keeps following the wall without any specific instructions to do so.  This is because the two motors used have slightly different speeds. Even though both are 200 rpm motors, it is impossible to have identical speed for both and there would be a small difference, owing to a variety of factors. This is one of Wally's motors (Image courtesy NEX Robotics) Wally's left motor is a wee bit faster than the right motor. So when she is told to go straight, she won't go exactly straight and would curve in to the right side. So when she goes near to the wall, with the wall being on the right side of Wally, the sensors on her right makes her turn away from the wall. Then when the wall is clear, though she is supposed to go straight, she curves in to the right. This triggers the sensors again. Over time this  keeps repeating, and it seems as if Wally is following the wall. This also means that...

I had always wanted to write a blog. Finally I've convinced myself to write one! I'm Praveen, an undergrad Mechanical Engineering student at the School of Engineering, Cochin University of Science and Technology. I'm very much passionate about Robotics,AI and other related fields and would like to share my journey into such stuff through this blog. So my first post would be about............ of course.......... my first step into the exciting field of Robotics. Yes my first robot doesn't do much and has limited intelligence, but hey, its just the beginning...... Her name is Wally........ no she has nothing to do with Wall-E. The name comes due to her strange behavior. She is indeed intelligent enough to avoid anyone coming in her way and also doesn't go banging her head against the wall. But she has a big problem, she loves to hang out with the wall and follows it everywhere. I really don't know why she keeps ignoring me!! STOP! Please Don't close ...