Puzzle Board #4

This version has a jpeg of the actual puzzle maze painted on the board. Although it is flat -- no real bumps, holes or walls -- the aim is to follow the line from the START to FINISH using a kind-of 3rd party line follower.
I.e. a webcam sees the ball and path from a distant perspective and "simulates" a line follower, keeping track of the heading of the ball and the direction the line points. It's just a matter of moving the axes under PID control (pretty heavy on the Kd term to prevent overshooting) until the ball travels all the way to the FINISH.
At present the "line follower" picks reasonably distant points from the ball to calculate the direction, so the ball doesn't end up following all the smaller twists and turns in the path.
But it's a reasonable approximation to a solution.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• maze
• robots
• PID control