How might I detect a laser point?

I'm working on my final year school project, and would like to incorporate my Arduino. My group is considering a laser guided vehicle, and I've been tasked with researching the guidance system.

Has anyone successfully been able to detect a laser point and move a vehicle toward it? Anyone have any suggestions about how I might be able to approach this (if it's even possible)?

If you use an IR laser you can use a set of IR receivers. Have an aray of the IR receivers side by side so as the bot drifts to one side or the other the bot will detect the beam on one of the side sensors and know to readjust course accordingly. You may be able to do something similar with a typical red or green laser and a set or LDRs. But the laser will have to register a high enough value threw the LDRs so its not confused by a brightly light room.

I just found this. Build your own laser receiver.
http://www.aaroncake.net/Circuits/laserxmt.asp

Remember that a flashing (aka "modulated") light is always easier to distinguish...

flashing (aka "modulated") light is always easier to distinguish.

It is providing you make the receiving amplifier a tuned amplifier, that is one that only responds to that frequency. It is like a band pass filter with a lot of gain.
That is you can't just connect the detector into the arduino and because it is modulated get a benefit.

Is this thread getting a split personality?

I think some people are talking about something to see and follow a dot created on the floor, wall, etc, by a lazer pointer, and others are talking about a system in which the robot has to be "hit" with the lazer pointer dot to respond.

Both valid and interesting projects, of course!

There's some information about a project that may, I think, be useful at...

In any case, it is a fun site. In that, the designer was working with an ordinary PC and analysing the image captured by a web-cam... but may contain useful ideas for you. He was tracking a dot reflected from a wall.

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Irrelevant ramblings: I knew I'd seen the thing above years ago... The author wrote me for information about the parallel port elements of an earlier project. But couldn't remember his name. I DID remember that he'd used a salvaged floppy disc drive mechanism... very cleverly... so searched with Google on "Laser dot follower servo floppy"... and sure enough, up came the site. (I could recognise his name, despite not being able to recall it.)

This reminds me of some kind of Wiimotehacks. The Wiimote-cam can output directly the x and y-coordinate of the 4 lightest points (and their size). As i remember, it talkes I2C, so it would be a doable task to use this information so get some kind of direction to drive. The y-value could also give you information about the distance of the laser-dot.
Just google some Wiimote-arduino-stuff and maybe you'll directly get what you are looking for.