Robotics P1

We'll just divide the range into two equal pieces and say that if the light level is less than 45 we want the robot to turn left. If it is greater than 45 we want to turn right. I won't go into how exactly the turns should be done. I'll just say that gentle turns work well for a fairly straight line

line with lots of curves usually needs to be making sharper turns. For gentle turns you might use Power levels of 50% on the fast wheel and 20% on the slow wheel. For sharper turns on a curvy line you might need to use 30% power for the fast wheel and coast or brake the slow wheel. Whatever power levels you use the numbers will be the same for the two turns, you just switch which motor gets the big number and which get the smaller number (or a stop command).

This type of a line follower will follow a line but it isn't very pretty. It looks OK on a straight line with with the motors programmed for gentle turns. But if the line has any curves then you have tell the robot to use sharper turns to follow line. That makes the robot swing back and forth across the line. The robot only "knows" how to do two things; turn left and turn right. This approach can be made to work but it is not very fast or accurate and looks terrible.

In the above approach the robot never drives straight, even if it is perfectly aligned with line's edge and the line is straight. That doesn't seem very efficient does it? Lets try to fix that. Instead of dividing our light value number line into two regions lets divide it into three.