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Racetrack Car Navigation

December 2023

About this project

This project was made for the final lab of Embedded Control. We had to program the TI-RSLK car to drive around a track without any intervention. During the semester, we were learning about the concepts of PWM and encoders, which would then be applied to car. This included turning, how to adjust the speed of each motor, and how to adjust the speed of each motor to ensure it drove in a straight line. 

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Our solution was to place markers around the track that the car would physically bump into, which told the car when to turn. Before driving, the user could program a path into the car, telling it to turn either left or right at certain points. 

When driving, the front two bumpers would get clicked, indicating that it had reached a marker and should turn accordingly. Due to small errors in the encoder, the car would still slightly veer off course, and may run into the track instead of the markers. In the event that this occurs, the side bumpers would get clicked, telling the car to slightly turn in the direction opposite where it is going. This process would repeat until the car successfully made a loop around the track.

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Reflection

This project was the ultimate culmination of everything me and my partner had learned during the semester. We learned how to use PWM, encoders, and all buttons and tricks on the TI-RSLK car. Now it was time to put it together and build our own design. There was a lot of debugging and fine tuning, as most of the code was made during previous labs. But once it worked, it was this big "Aha" moment coupled with excitement and glee. Just the idea of the creating an autonomous remote car was so cool to the both of us. In some ways, this class was my biggest inspiration for continuing to work with microcontrollers and embedded systems. 

Documentation

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