During the year I was a visiting student at Illinois Institute of Technology, I was able to work on projects from distinct areas of computation and other disciplines. OYT was a project designed for an embedded system course, which relied on the combination of multiple technologies to create a line follower robot.
Equipped with a set of sensors and some other basic components, this On Your Track (OYT) robot is able to follow a line, making corrections to its path according to the direction the line goes. The sensors are strategically positioned to recognize different line patterns and colors, making the possibilities even wider. With such a simple mechanism, this device fulfills its purpose of performing as many different tasks as the user can think of, with little investment, since it needs no special tracks or rails, just a simple line on the floor.
This robot comprehends the understanding of the sensors’ behaviors and functionality, PCB elaboration, software operations such as robot control. The robot is mainly composed of infrared sensors to detect the color difference between the track and the surface, an ultrasonic sensor to be able to stop without hitting an obstacle, transistors to control both DC motors, LI-PO batteries, and an XBee module to receive and send data to a stationary computer that has another XBee and the MATLAB software. The stationary computer uses MATLAB to control the robot tasks, as well as receive its status and the data collected by the sensors through the XBee.