senior project competition
four days after getting home from wisconsin, my senior project was due. talk about crunch time. i dunno if i ever talked about what the project was: we programmed a truck to autonomously navigate a course of colored pylons. my biggest responsibility was the control and navigation of the truck. sadly i didn’t do as well as i had hoped. i made too many assumptions about the quality of the input i would be receiving from our vision subsystem, so the whole thing quickly turned into me hacking on code to get it to work. i tried implementing a PID controller to get better control over our throttle, but that just turned into a rat hole. anyway, come day of the competition we were at least driving courses, albeit slowly. we completed the first two courses in 4th place, but we ran into a major snag on the fourth course. our vision couldn’t detect even the first pylon of the course! the lighting had changed in the garden court over the day and we were driving blind. so i quickly hacked together what i lovingly called “blind faith” mode that essentially just weaved back and forth until it found a pylon. it actually worked and we got a pretty awesome time! in the end we still got 4th, but it was a very close 4th. i was happy we at least finished.
testing out a simple course the night before.
vroom!
team “i can has rayzkar?”, proud to have finished the courses.