Hello there!
I'm new here. I stumbled upon this forum in my quest to help my School's robotics club create a decent line follower that can actually compete.
I never understood why my colleague's robots always fail at the very start to follow a simple line while other schools seem to have the secret formula for creating a terminator line follower.
So I came here for tips (and I apologies if my post is redundant, I looked around and I couldn't find anything similar).
Can anyone here help me with a link to an article or a video with several tips for making a line follower? Do you have your own advice?
I'm as interested in the physical design of the robot as I am interested in the code. I feel that some of my colleagues go with a horrible layout for the sensors and and an overall terrible body structure for the robot that can make it difficult for the sensors to work well with the movement.
From my observations as I watched the winning line followers in the competitions, I believe that sensors need to be as close as possible to the ground and as close as possible to the center of rotation of the robot. And please correct me if I'm wrong.
Also, how do you deal with the influence of ambient light? Are there types of sensors that can work better than others in this case? Infrared instead of black and white sensors maybe?
I dunno, I'm just an amateur enthusiast that wishes to bring his robotics club out of the dirt. And I came to the more experienced folks in here for advice. Any help would be deeply appreciated!
Did you really not find any useful ideas or projects when you Googled "Arduino line follower robot"? Or when you searched in Youtube for the same thing. That's not easy to believe.
Do the searches and pick one (or maybe two) that look reasonable to you. Then we might be able to offer suggestions for improvements.
I did, I just didn't want to follow a certain model blindly and apply it to an unrelated situation in any upcoming competition. It would be like trying to fit a cube in a cylindrical hole.
I was just looking for general tips that would allow me to be flexible enough with whatever needs I'll have to fulfill with the line follower.
But again, apologies if I'm filling the forum with junk topics.
Line followers follow lines on the floor. Do you think that an upcoming competition might want a line follower to do something different? What complications have previous competitions thrown at you or your team that you have found difficult to handle?
Since you have a number of failed projects to look at your first step should be to make a real effort to understand what went wrong with them. Understanding why things don't work is valuable information to feed into your next design.
Then find a good example online which doesn't seem to have the problems you've identified, build it, and this is the important part, really understand why it is put together as it is and how it works then you'll be way ahead of the game. That understanding will allow you to make any necessary modifications if something different does come up or at least to come back here with some more specific questions.
