This project started at University of California, San Diego. The goal is to build an autonomous line-following robot that competes in a race for the best finish time through a track. The platform for this robot is a 1/12th scale RC car platform. To this platform we designed a boom and mount for a line-scanning camera. A motor driver board was also fabricated based on a TI motor driver IC chip. The “brains” of the robot is a Beaglebone Black that generates a clock signal as well as reads the output of the camera. We also attached an encoder onto the axle of the vehicle so that we can read the speed and slow down when approaching a sharper turn. Check out the robot below!

Here we can see the output of the camera being read by the Beaglebone. The output values above a certain threshold is being taken as the line on the ground. One key lesson learned during the competition that ensued is to test the camera under different lighting conditions. Portions of the course could be too bright and saturate your camera causing you lose track!