When we first stepped into the world of Robotics (it was like 3 years ago, I think), it was all very hazy and lifeless. Not much research and development was made cognizant to the outside world and it may have seemed at that point that some Japanese kid was deeply building a humanoid in a secret underground bunker somewhere in the forgotten lands of Japan. Well, the situation has changed substantially now. Robotics has gained wide spread popularity in the last couple of years by electronics and computer hobbyists around the world. Better robotic systems, cheaper parts, faster algorithms and the advent of open source project tools and resources with a never ending urge to design and build an autonomous system that could make your life simpler than you can imagine have created a wave in the minds of the people, motivating them to push their limits of understanding and to look deep into the potentially promising world of Robotics.

This article is about the robot we built for a International Level Competition held in National Institute of Technology, Calicut on 2007. The problem statement was to build an autonomous robot that has to traverse a maze of lines and nodes and has to reach the finish point (which was diagonally opposite to the starting point). During its course, it might be obstructed with obstacles which it has to avoid and take a different route to reach the finish point. There were enough obstacles in the maze to ensure that only a few paths existed from Start to Finish. After the bot reaches the end, it must come back to the starting point and travel again in the shortest possible path.

There are basically two ways to improve the performance and speed of the robot. One is to come up with an excellent sensor arrangement that adapts to any possible arena (line following). It may not always be the best but care must be taken so as to avoid any flaws or loopholes that you are aware about. The other one is to have an impeccable algorithm and coding strategy. If your coding is top notch and the algorithms are rightly written or chosen, there won't be any room for errors. The run will be perfectly flawless. This should be a mantra that one has to follow and there are no shortcuts, I'm afraid!

It was quite a challenge to build an algorithm for this robot. The testing stage was even more painful. We had to manually construct an arena which was pretty cumbersome. But finally, we pulled it off and quite evidently as we shall see in the video, the jury were nothing short of being impressed. Seemed like they never saw robots which worked like a charm ;)