Working in teams of 4, we were required to build a robotic 'mars rover' contained within a plastic sphere and controlled over WiFi using an Arduino Nano 33 IoT. A an overhead 'satellite' (webcam) was mounted facing downwards to capture a live feed of the robot, which could then be processed by a connected 'mission control' laptop to locate the robot and other objects and communicate with the Arduino accordingly. The robot was to be tested in a 30-minute demonstration in which it would move from point to point. In addition, an 'event' of the team's devising was to happen at some arbitrary point during the demonstration which the robot would have to respond to. However, the task was open-ended and we were encouraged to add other elements to make it more interesting and challenging.
The Arduino was programmed using Simulink, MATLAB's block-modelling package, and the mission control program was written in Python using the OpenCV computer vision library and ArUco fiducial marker library.
My role in the team was to write the low-level Python code, which consisted of two parts:
The finished prototype had several notable features (those I personally developed are in bold):
