Hi! I am somewhat new to robotics and want to try my hand at some practical code (practical as in making machines do things 
) and I'm working on an engineering project at my university. We're supposed to make a vehicle that can move a certain distance and then hit a target with a projectile. I have an Arduino at home I'm willing to sacrifice to the project, but I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas as to running code without having to control it (since we can't touch our projects, they must move independently towards the goal). Ideally I want to do something with some code that's executable with a mouse or space bar click. Is Arduino the best option for this? Thank you! 
Does turning it on, or plugging in the battery, count as touching it?
A useful phrase to Google is "arduino autonomous robot". There are thousands of them already and they can do all sorts of things.
Usually you start them just by switching power on but if you really must start the activity remotely that's perfectly possible using any number of different wireless communication methods.
Steve
We can turn it on or plug it in, as they consider that prep work. It doesn't have to be remotely. I was thinking of using a button that executes the code. I've been told I can do so using Python and a raspberry pi.
The code will run when you power it up, so you could easily just have a say 5 second delay in setup() to allow you to put the robot on the track and line it up to the target then walk away.
If you're allowed a button press or throw of an on-robot switch to arm it, that's easy too. Have a while() in setup() reading the switch but holding in setup() while the switch is high, then when the switch's state changes to low, leave the while(), head into loop() and off it goes.