D - Speed Competition!

Whilst line following robots are very important in factories, speed line following competitions are very popular in Universities and schools all over the world.

Have a look at the video from a competition in Japan - this robot even does 2 runs. On the first run it learns the track so it can go really fast on the second run!

Your teacher will tell you exactly what course you will be racing on, but it could contain anything you have learnt so far:

Curvy tracks

Breaks in the track

Sharp Turns

Obstacles

You need to make the best program you possibly can by combining together all of the separate things you have learnt, to complete the course in the fastest time.

You will have a chance to test your robot on the course before the race at the end.

A proportional system will usually be faster than a simple digital one

Test your robot as much as you can to find out where it might go wrong!

Use Sparkles as feedback to help you work out exactly what your robot is doing

Try and have something in your program that attempts to find the line again if the robot gets lost - you never know what will happen on the final run!

Try to keep your program simple (don't use more blocks than you need to) to keep it running quickly.

Good luck!

Here are some examples of obstacles you could use in a course!

You can assign points to each obstacle, so each one successfully navigated gets a certain number of points, depending on the difficulty.

Here are some crossovers and tightly packed tracks.

Straight breaks, curved breaks and offset breaks

Obstacles (on curved and straight track), thin sections and a spiral

This one is very difficult - the dead end switchback!