Inspiration
Over the past couple of years, countless companies have developed prototypes of delivery robots that are simply impractical and not designed for daily life. A large reason for this can be drawn to the complexion and overambitious nature of the machines. They rely heavily on GPS tracking and machine learning, but in order for a robot to operate in the busy and unpredictable setting that daily life offers, we believe it is best to keep the design simple, sensible, and much more resistant. We wanted to create an equitable delivery robot that can be used for a very wide variety of purposes depending on the users/organizations' needs.
What it does
The robot has a line sensor at the bottom of it that we programmed to track where it is with respect to the line and how to correct itself. If it gets lost, it is programmed to move either left or right depending on where it is with respect to the line. The robot also has indicator lights that show which direction the robot will be turning so that people can see where it is going. The robot follows this line until it reaches an end indicator line that is just two lines on the side of the original line in a specific place. The robot detects this and stops, indicating that the route is finished and food/drinks can be picked up by people on the dance floor. If the robot bumps into something, it triggers a switch that automatically stops the robot. The robot is programmed with FSM states. The first state is the “waiting” state where nothing happens. A switch is then pressed and the robot starts going into states depending on where it is with respect to the line.
How we built it
To begin the process of building our delivery robot we designed a finite state machine to ha