This project is an autonomous robot, designed to perform a series of basic tasks without any human input. It’s based on the 2018 Roborodentia competition, in which teams of students design and build a small (roughly 1 square foot) robot that collects small foam spheres from vertical tubes on the edges of a table-sized arena, and shoot them into goals across the field. The more foam spheres the robot makes into the goals after a 3 minute time period, the more points they get. The challenge is doing so autonomously, without any human input after the initial timer for the start of the match.
Several assistive elements are laid out on the field to allow a robot to detect its surroundings without human input. One such element, found on the floor of the field, is lines of black electrical tape against the white background that lead to all four vertical loading stations, as well as a separate horizontal loading station. The robot I built detects these lines using a series of infrared sensors, and navigates from loading station to loading station using these lines as guides, shooting the foam spheres into goals along the way