Each quarter the school will be holding a Tech-Fest to give electronics students an opportunity to display and compete with their electronic creations. Here is the basic information on the robots to be presented and the competition events and rules.
The line-following robots will be required to complete laps around the race course.
Line following courses and line mazes will use standard 3/4 inch electrical tape as the line. There will be three possible courses. The exact course before the contest will be unknown, but several examples are shown here:
Figure 1: Simple Line Following Course
This course will offer winding turns that will be fairly easy to navigate. Most robots with even one or two sensors can successfully complete this course. The challenge will be to complete the course faster than other competitors.
Figure 2: Complex Line Following Course
The complex line-following course will possibly contain greater that 90 degree turns, or perhaps even an intersection or two. The challenge for this course is to force the robot to figure out the algorithm and/or sensor combination that will detect more complex turns and intersections.
Figure 3: Line Maze Course
This is an existing line maze set up for practice. The contest maze will be modified to prevent robots from having prior knowledge of the exact course.
Line maze robots will have four attempts at traversing the maze. The fastest time in any run becomes the time for that robot. The robot that solves the maze in the shortest time is the winner.
The maze will consist of a series of intersecting 3/4 inch lines made of electrical tape. No line will be closer that six inches to any other parallel line and the minimum distance between any two intersections will be six inches. (These distances are approximate. Your robot will be expected to deal with minor imperfections in the actual course.)
All intersections will be at right angles (close to 90 degrees). There will be no loops in the maze, which avoids the possibility that a robot could find a repeating or circular path. Dead ends are not marked; the line simply terminates.
Here is what all of the eight possible things the robot can encounter:
The start will be identified by a three inch black "T". Robots must start with some part of their body over the T intersection. The finish is identified as a black 3 X 7 inch rectangle. Time starts when the robot begins to move at the T and ends when the robot reaches the finish rectangle.
Robots shall use the black tape as the guide and follow it. Leaving the path and taking any sort of a short-cut to shorten the path is not allowed. Any other behavior deemed by the judges to use an unusual behavior used as a way to solve the maze in an unconventional way, could result in the disqualification of any robot.
It is not required, but a possible scenario is: