Improvements

The tracking of the line was further improved by building on top of the exiting routine. The existing routine would only be used if the bow sensor of the robot was off the line. If it was on the line the robot would just go straight. As soon as the bow went off the line the robot would track. In essence the robot will go straight in two cases. The first case is when the bow is on the line. The second is if the bow is off the line and both line sensors have equal value. The only time the latter is possible is when the robot is off course and all the sensors are dark. This occurs at the beginning of the course when the robot has to find the line. This feature of the track line routine allows it to be recycled for the initial find line routine, which was the intention all along. As a result the robot tracked more smoothly.In addition to just running the course I also had the robot make full use of the on board liquid crystal display. In addition to displaying the state name, the robot also displayed the bumper switches, the light sensors, the battery voltage, and the frob knob voltage. The bumper switches were display as "B", or "S" if hit, and "*" if not. The light sensors were displayed as "D" if dark, and "L" if light. In the case of the line sensors, a "<" indicated the line was more to the left, and a ">" indicated the line was more to the right. A pair of "|" indicated that the robot has to go straight because the sensors were either on both dark or both light. Since there was no room on the LCD to show both the battery voltage and the knob voltage, I only showed the battery voltage when the knob was turned off and had a voltage less than 0.1 volt. To differentiate what voltage was being displayed, the voltage was properly labeled, and it was changed as the knob was switched on and off.

*******************************************************************

Shows all the required output of the eebot Robot challenge on the

Liquid Crystal Display.

Bow bumper (*=not hit ,B=hit) _____E&F Sensors

\ / / (<,- = line is left )

---------------------- (-,> = line is right)

State name -----> |Right Turn * <L> | (|,| = line is center)

Voltage value --> |Knob= 9.7V S DLD |

----------------------

\_________/ | \_/

| | \

Display the battery | Light sensors (L=light, D=dark)

voltage if the frob |

knob is < 0.1 Volt Stern bumper (* not hit, S hit)

*******************************************************************

In addition to that the turns of the robot were improved by having different styles of turning in different states. The alive indicator was also used to show that the robot had not crashed. Please see the attached assembly language code for more details about all these features of the robot.

Table of Content