Over the last few months, we’ve been participating in the Square One Network’s V2X Challenge. V2X stands for “Vehicle to Anything” and the idea behind the program is to create innovative approaches to vehicle design.
For this competition, we focused on three different projects.
The first challenge required us to program a small car to follow a path autonomously. Chase designed a cross pattern for our car and – even though it was a little trickier than he expected – his program worked just as he hoped.
For the second challenge, our car had to start in a one square foot box, drive two feet away from the box, turn 180 degrees, and finish by parking entirely in the box again. Chase tried a couple of very sophisticated approaches to this using a couple different types of encoders but he wasn’t able to get them to work in time.
He ended up using a basic encoder that he knew how to use from other projects he’s done in the past. Not surprisingly, his program worked as it was designed.
In our final challenge, we had to program the car to avoid obstacles. It needed to drive forward until it detected an object in its path, stop, then restart after the obstacle was removed, and begin driving again once the second obstacle was removed. This was probably the easiest challenge and Chase had no problem with it at all.
One of the fun aspects of this particular competition is that we had to submit videos of our programming and the quality of the video mattered. That meant that Landon once again got to play a huge role for us.
Landon put together three very professional videos for us to submit and made Chase’s programming look incredible.
We had a ton of fun with this competition and Chase learned a lot in the process.
Not only that we were very successful too – we won the Innovative Design Award and got 2nd place for Robot Performance!!!
