Eunice here! The Borg team’s been cracking our heads over how exactly we’ll accomplish the task of the project; getting the Pi-Car to autonomously navigate a maze. We threw tons of ideas for an effective algorithm… Getting a simple Pi-Car to do something so delicate is going to be really hard with our hardware and programming knowledge restrictions.
But then it hit us.
We don’t know how much our Pi-Cars are capable of.
So we decided to set aside our precious Friday afternoons to have a play date with our cars.
I brought some black masking tape and drew a simple little maze on the floor of the CIS hallway (or well…attempted to before I ran out of tape). We used an empty cup to represent our movable object. The Pi-Car’s line sensors aren’t the most accurate in the world, so there was no way we could start writing an algorithm based off assumptions on what the cars’ are capable of.
And we were right.
Everyone in the team was having issues getting their cars to detect the black tape properly. We spent most of our time recalibrating again and again until we got the most accurate readings possible…But even so it didn’t stop the cars have issues with following or detecting sharp turns/corners, nor did it stop the cars from driving over a dead end.
The coding progress wasn’t massive but… We’re getting big steps! Part of programming a robot is knowing what it can and can’t do, we needed to establish realistic expectations for the robots from step 1. This gave us a lot of insight on how we should re-approach this project.
