LVBots March 2014 dead reckoning competition

On March 6, LVBots held another competition at Pololu. This time, it was a dead reckoning contest: each robot had to find a line course and follow it to its end while keeping track of its position, then try to return to its starting position without any external navigational aids. Scoring was based on how close to the starting position the robot ended up, as well as how quickly it got there. The complete rules are available here (23k pdf). You can see a selection of the entries in this video compilation from the contest.

David has already posted about his entry. My robot was R2-DR, the miniature astromech droid, and I’ll be writing a post about it soon, too.

Are you in the Las Vegas area? Check out the LVBots Meetup page and drop by this Thursday, March 20, to see the robots in person!

Updates: You can read more about each of our robots in these blog posts:

• David and Fang’s dead reckoning robot based on the mbed LPC1768
• Brandon’s dead reckoning robot
• R2-DR, Kevin’s dead reckoning robot
• Claire’s dead reckoning robot
• Paul’s dead reckoning robot
• Jon’s dead reckoning robot
• Jamee’s dead reckoning robot