What's that Smell?
Builder: Jan MalasekOn the Thursday before the LVBots Challenge 2.0 contest, I figured I should build a line follower since that seemed like the category that would take the least amount of work. (The name comes from the smell of the spray paint on the foam and the robot's front zig-zagging on the line like a dog looking for something.)
I had some light foam model airplane landing gear wheels, which with some drilling and epoxying fit okay on Solarbotics GM2 gearmotors on which I tried out the 14:1 gear ratio conversion. I figured everything had to stay light because of the low gear ratio, so I made the chassis out of styrofoam. I had some scrap pieces which took just a few cuts with a knife to turn into a trapezoid. The fin is epoxied on to make the thing a bit stiffer.
The bottom view shows the rest of the construction. Most parts are glued on, which makes assembly quick but modifications nearly impossible. The brain is a Baby Orangutan; there are two line sensors. The robot mostly goes just left or right depending on the two sensors, and the distance from the wheels to the sensors smoothes things out. The piece of electrical tape covers two wires over which I sent serial troubleshooting data.
The robot performed fairly well, but the cheap plastic casters gradually got gummed up as I tuned the robot. It got down to about 34 seconds on the LVBots race track the first few times, but the time kept rising. In the actual contest, the three laps took about 37 seconds, or about 75 cm/second. What's that Smell? won first place since it never had to run against Byon's Laser, which got knocked out in an earlier run against Byon's slower Blue Lightning.
