The laser pointer is mounted on a rotating arm with two degrees of freedom. It is connected to a PC with the maze already known in software. The software laser pointer can see the 8 squares surrounding it and uses a solving algorithm called Dijkstra's algorithm, a breadth-first graph-navigation algorithm.
The software was done entirely in National Instruments' LabVIEW. We had a team of size do this in two weeks for a robotics project at Olin College of Engineering.
Erik, i just remembered how much I miss your ridiculous accent. :P
-Molly
crazydeathyak 3 years ago