Aditya Vishnu

For the past few week I have messing around my new Arduino Uno and part of that involved putting together a robust robot which is autonomous, for my robotics tournament. 

I came to the competition hoping for a top five position, and but I came out above all odds to finish number one! Not only have I won the tournament but I had also posted the highest final score out of any contestants.

Problem Statement: To design an autonomous robot which can throwaway the objects placed on the surface which is kept at a height, avoiding to fall down itself. This task has to be completed in a allowed time slot of 5 minutes.

I used acrylic fibre sheets for the chassis,IR sensors to detect the edges and standard DC motors and wheels.

To throw away the objects kept on the surface I attached sheet in the front of the robot.Since it was not known whether the venue is in-door or out-door,hence I covered up my IR Sensors with black sheet because IR sensors doesn't give effective reading sunlight.

A few weeks ago I ordered my first Arduino board from arduino.cc. I chose Arduino Uno which costed Rs.1700.So,why I chose Uno? One of the reasons for choosing Uno is that I am only novice to the programming field and it seemed good choice for beginners, another reason is that at a speed of 16mhz, it is one of the fastest micro-processor available in the market. It also in-houses LEDs (for easy debugging of coding) and a reset button to restart the program on the chip .

It comes up with 32KB memory which from a programmer's point of view is a huge amount of memory. To be precise, 32KB is equivalent to 32x1024 bytes which can store about 32,768 characters of coding.

Uno can be programmed easily by downloading the Arduino firmware which is available for free at arduino.cc. For users who are known to C++ language,programming in Arduino will seem very easy,but for new ones it might be a challenging task at first. 

For my class 9th Science Exhibition I made this car--->

Since it was my very first car,Hence I used standard MECHANIX KIT to build the chassis for the car.To give it a cool funky look I used multi-coloured LEDs.

To make it environment friendly,I made it work on Solar Energy.I used a 9V solar cell to charge our inhouse 9V Battery,which produces 4-9 Volts,depending upon the intensity of the light. Since our exhibition was mainly in-door, hence it used to produce only 4-5 V. Now according to the laws of electricity the current only flows from high potential to low potential. Hence, as a result our battery started draining out because the current started flowing in reverse direction towards the solar cell.To solve this problem I used a miniature diode so that the current flows only from solar cell towards the battery.

I made a Line Follower bot using Lego Mindstorm Kit back in the year 2011.

The main objective of a Line follower is to follow a line (generally black in color).

The trick to following a line when all you have is one light sensor is that you don't follow the line, you follow the line's right (or left) edge. You try to stay exactly on the border between the dark area and the light area. The light sensor reports shades of gray when it passes from black to white. You choose a value that you think corresponds to the edge and then when the sensor reports a value brighter than the threshold value, you turn left, and when it reports a value darker than the threshold value, you turn right.

My first ever science project in 7th standard made along with my friend Anant Jain.We made a working model of Water Cycle.