Robotaksi 2018 (Teknofest)
This is the car that I made for the Robotaksi competition at the very first Teknofest. It was also my personal first experience competing in a programming/robotics competition, and it went well. Although I had competed solo rather than with a team, I had still managed to successfully get in the top 3 and was able to get my reward from the president of Turkey himself!
The project consists of a Raspberry Pi 3, a camera, several DC
motors, a servo motor to steer, another servo motor to rotate the
camera, a line detection sensor, and an ultrasonic sensor. While I
built the car from a kit using an instruction book, my dad and I
made a few modifications using our own 3D printed parts, such as the
aforementioned camera rotating.
The rules of the competition were to make an autonomous vehicle
travel along a set path, pick up and drop off passengers by stopping
at certain stops, stopping at stop signs, and once the entire course
is finished, parking by entering into one of the empty park spaces.
The first thing I did was use the line detection sensor to run a
simple line following program. After finishing the line detecting,
the next thing I decided to work on was the parking algorithm. At
first I struggled to park because we couldn't actually see if any
spaces were full or not, thus led to the addition of the rotating
camera at the top rather than a stationary one. With this addition,
I had moved onto the other aspects of the program. After working on
everything and testing it at home using a road my parents and I made
to resemble the actual course, I finally felt ready to compete. All
the teams were given a day before the competition to see how well
the car fares on the actual course. When the day before the
competition arrived however, I made a terrible discovery. I wasn't
anticipating the competition to be outdoors on an actual "road", I
thought it was going to be indoors on a mat. Nowhere in the rule
booklet was it mentioned that the competition was going to be
outside, and this was a problem because my line detection sensor
wasn't working. That night we had to go home without being able to
test our car out at all, but it wasn't all bad. At home we ended up
making a cover over the line detector to prevent the sun from
hitting it. The next morning we arrived at the competition as early
as possible so I could test hours before the competition started.
After several hours of fixing up other problems with the code, I was
finally truly ready for the competition, and managed to get second
place as a result.
Here is a short demo video of the car in action: