Industry-based Training Course for Line Following Maze Robot Implementation

摘要

This study provides a robot system course which implements the line following maze robot and designs a shortest path searching algorithm. The objective aims to motivate the students to design hardware circuit, and the related algorithms and to implement the algorithm in firmware. The robot system contains three parts, 1) the optical sensors to detect the line position, 2)UART transmission for two micro-controllers and 3) a shortest path algorithm for a maze map. After joining this class, the students can learn many industrial skills, including designing the optical sensors for the line position, implementing a UART-based protocol for two microcontrollers, and developing a shortest path algorithm for the unknown tree-based map. The concept of merging the path which analyzes the routing paths of two different algorithms is presented to further reduce the shortest path. This line following maze robot is cheap (～USD$150) and contains the necessary theories for embedded systems, automatic control theory, and path-finding algorithms. The robot system course is interesting enough to draw the students to learn the industrial skills, such as the hardware circuits, the control theory and the path-finding algorithm.