Line width: Sparki needs to be able to see the walls of the maze and not shoot right over them.
Here are the most important rules to follow if you are creating your own printed maze for this Sparki activity: 1. Things like the number of sensors, the distances between them, and the distances from the sensors to the wheels centers may become really important in the maze solving activity. (We’ll go over how Sparki will use these sensors to find the walls in just a moment.) But other constraints are not that obvious, and we may need to figure them out when we are programming the maze solver algorithm on a specific robot. The walls of a maze corridor for Sparki need to be just a little bit narrower than the space between Sparki’s two infrared edge sensors. Sparki might sense some walls, but they might be a corridor or two over to the right or left since Sparki is so huge in comparison to the maze. Suppose that your robot is too big (or too small) for the maze: The robot will not even be able to see some of the turns because they are underneath it! The sensors also won’t be in the right place in order to sense the walls. Some are easier to spot, like the size of the robot to the maze. There are some shape and size constraints that we should think of when leaving a poor robot alone in a maze. But sooner or later we will find that not every robot can solve every maze. First, let’s talk a bit about geometry… Maze Geometry and Sparki We can freely draw a maze and try to program Sparki to escape from it.
Tracking in fast forward any maze how to#
Let’s remember what sensors we have: Soon we’ll see how to use these infrared sensors in our maze solving problem. And to do that, we will need to use all of our line and edge sensors. What do we have on our Sparki to imitate this behavior in a printed maze? The line following infrared sensors! So, how do we implement the “Left Hand” algorithm with Sparki ? The first thing to do is to ensure that Sparki really understands the lines that he is “viewing” with the infrared sensors. One will get Sparki through the maze faster, but you’ll never know which one unless you’ve seen the maze before. Take a look to the following animation, where the red point represents the person: Do you see the trick? It’s important to stick with either the left hand rule or the right hand rule and never switch between them in the middle of the maze. It might take you a while and you might wind up taking all the wrong paths in the maze before getting to the end but by keeping your left hand on the wall of the maze you wind up taking every single left hand turn (sometimes turning around completely) and, as long as you keep taking steps forward, eventually you’ll get to the end of the maze. And by “always”, we really mean always here. Finding the exit could be done just by keeping one of your hands always touching a wall. Forget about the robot for a while, and suppose that you are a person inside a maze.
How It Works One of the simplest ways of solving a maze with a robot is by using the Wall Follower algorithm, also know as the left-hand rule (or right-hand rule).
Tracking in fast forward any maze download#
If you’re really into mazes, you can download that maze’s source SVG file, and modify it using the Inkscape open source vector graphics editor (or any other SVG editor of your choice). You can also download a ready to print maze from this link (please note that this maze can be printed in standard plotters, since it’s 90 cm wide). You can also make your own with a white cardboard as the base, using black insulating plastic tape to “print” the walls. What we will use here is the poster in ArcBotics’ Sparki Materials Packs. So, let’s help Sparki get through the maze! What You’ll Need To understand this lesson, it’s strongly recommended that you have learned the concepts from the Line Following and the Moving the Robot lessons first. Introduction Solving a maze is fun and will help you build your roboticist skills up- thinking about every instruction that Sparki needs to not just wander around the maze, but actually complete it. At this point, with the things that we have already learned in the previous lessons, we can take advantage of some of Sparki’s sensors to implement some maze solving programs.