Autonomous Car x 2

Currently, for our lab component of the ECE 110 class, we were required to build an autonomous car that can navigate a course of white tape on black which has splits and sharp turns. The design of such a car pushed us to implement our theoretical knowledge from lecture and physically apply it. We've had to use a wide range of concepts such as transistors, logic gate functions, binary values, resistance, A/D conversion sampling, Mux selector chips, and most importantly, intuitive thinking.

The idea of such a car has been around since the time technology has begun to exponentially boom; in an old Soviet film, an autonomous car escapes from a laboratory and as man walks by it drinking milk, the self directing car sends him running out of fear and spilling milk from his. The car begins to follow the milk trail he produces and this becomes the final straw for him (in Mother Russia, car drive you!). Such technological capabilities are not intimidating anymore and are now considered basic in the spectrum of electronics. For this lab, we had to design all of the circuitry to make our car move independently using only information picked up by infrared sensors which can distinguish white from black.


In our Engineering 198 class, we were assigned to do a project with an Arduino controller and were simply told, "make it move." Our group had many ideas but when I told them what our ECE 110 class was doing in lab, all of them immediately gained interest. So we decided to do a similar construction, except this one being mostly software based for the logic. And so we did.
It was a little more basic without any split track detection capabilities or such but it was still very interesting to do the project from a different perspective.