A partner and I designed and built a line tracking robot rover using IR sensors and Arduino IDE, with me focusing on hardware and him on software and integration.
This project was a two-person build of an autonomous line-following robot using Arduino, IR (infrared) sensors, and motor-driven locomotion. The success criterion was a clean 5-lap run around the track with no diversions off the line and no significant stalls or hesitations in movement. Work was split by discipline: I was in charge of end-to-end hardware management: handling the chassis, motor mounting, sensor placement, and wiring, while my parnter, focused on software/integration, handled the control logic: reading sensor input, translating it into motor commands, and tuning the feedback loop that kept the car centered on the line. The main challenge encountered was IR sensor sensitivity. The sensors initially struggled to reliably distinguish the track line from the surrounding surface, causing erratic steering corrections. This was resolved on the hardware side by calibrating the sensors specifically to the reflectance/color contrast of the track surface, rather than relying on generic threshold values. Tuning the sensor response to the actual light/dark contrast of the line versus the track background stabilized sensor readings and allowed the car to track the line consistently, ultimately enabling the required 5-lap run without diversions. A snippet of a test run is shown below.