The History

This entire project started as a result of participating in the Waterloo Robot Racing competition representing the University of British Columbia as part of the Thunderbird Robotics Team. The challenge was to build a small autonomous robot that could navigate a course demarcated by orange traffic cones. Our entry was based on a Tamiya remote-control Hummer kit, and was controlled by an Arduino microcontroller. The robot had infrared line-following sensors and ultrasonic rangefinders. What the robot really needed was a vision system. I was so enthused by the whole project that I decided that I wanted to build a robot of my own, based on an R/C car.