EcoCar CAVs – Line Following Robot

In EcoCar we built a Line Following Robot as our introduction project. This tasked us with the goal of taking a simple Amazon kit and working as a team to create a robot that could follow a line with just a camera. I was on the Motors team during this project and was tasked with creating an API for the other teams to use for moving the robot. One of the problems we solved was calculating how fast the robot should move given a certain number from -1 to 1, with the sign signifying the direction the car is moving in. We solved this problem by testing the distance the car moved given different values between those 0 and 1 then flipped the result for the reverse direction. This gave us the ability to apply a linear function of control to a non-linear function of speed, which means that teams that have not learned how they work will have a much easier time developing around them. This project was really fun because it allowed me to work on the part of the robot that I want to get my degree in. I would love to have at least part of my job require physically touching some machine to get it to work and not just sitting behind a computer all the time. This project also exposed me a bit more to autonomous vehicles, which is a topic that I have been interested in for awhile now. The EcoCar CAVs team should continue to teach me more on this topic.

Programming environment during the project