Line Follower Robot with Webcam

December 20, 2018

Robotics subject was not the favorite subject of me. I disliked this subject because I didn’t have any interests to make robots. I wanted to learn Artificial Intelligence specifically about how machine learned. After finishing this subject, my mind had changed a little about robotics. If we want to learn Artificial Intelligence then robotics subject is the basics. We can’t understand how machine learns and works if we don’t understand how to make robots.

Robots in this time aren’t as robots in the past. The definition of robot is not “a machine who help people” anymore but better to say it “a program who help people”. We can make any dead things helpful if we add programs in it. That’s why Internet of Things came.

I thought this subject only taught me the very basics of robots. We should learn it more if we were interested in it. The problem of this subject was the final project that we should make. Our lecturer forced us to make a robot program which had a computer vision in it and also it should move. With a lot of deficiencies, my team which was contained Shofi and Raihan chose to make a line follower wheelchair program.

At first we thought it would be easy since we were already taught about how to make a line follower. But it was far from our expectations. Finally we chose to use a small motor instead rather than the wheelchair because the wheelchair was really complex. The small motor type was DFRobot L298P and it was already in the robotics lab so we didn’t have to buy it. We also used smartphone camera as the webcam which was needed for the computer vision and a blue tape for making the way.

The hard process of making this project was the programs. We were really thankful to Ibnu’s team and Senior Umar’s team for the Python and Arduino programs as our references because without them we didn’t know what to make, seriously. You can check the programs in my Github here.

On the day of presentation time to the lecturer, we showed it without any openings or greetings OMG. Actually we still tried the robot but the lecturer thought we already showed it for the final presentation LOL. I knew it wasn’t the best presentation but I hoped we would get a good score for this project. Unfortunately, because we were already too happy to end this project we forgot to take the picture or video of this project. So sad. It’s okay, just let it go.