This little guy was also a kit. He hails from Trossen Robotics and cost a whopping $30. It’s a line following robot, which is to say that you draw a dark line on a light background on the floor, and the robot will zip along following the line until it runs out of batteries or the dog bites it.
Yellow Thing, ready to follow!
It’s actually kind of clever, the twin motor/gearbox combinations mount vertically inside, as does the controller board. It runs on a couple of AA batteries.
It’s kind of neat. You hold it in your hand and switch it on, and but for an LED lighting up, it does nothing else. But when you lower it to a surface, about 3 inches above it the motors will initialize and start running. When you set it on the running surface, it takes off pretty smartly. In spite of a video which said it was a bad idea, I made a track of a figure eight. Each time the robot crossed the intersection, it would shudder quickly a few times as it tried to figure out what just happened to its line. But even if by inertia alone, the bot figured it out. Later I made a course with a whole bunch of turns, but no line crossovers. It dutifully followed the line again an again until I realized I was getting bored.
After all, he was just practice for the larger event to come. Fabricating my own root. Anyway, I never did come up with a name for this. It seems to defy my attempts. I can think of names, I just don’t like them on the robot. So I just call it Yellow Thing.