Mars mission, strategy and code

Yesterday our rover and the ones produced by other teams competed on the mars platform and demonstrated their abilities to find lakes. Unfortunately our Rover didn’t make it in the top 3, but it did manage to find one lake as you can see in the video below. This is the end of the project, and therefore it is time to publish our source code. The full source is available in a zip-file here and the most important part, the strategy, is web-viewable here.

The strategy comes down to this: The rover starts in exploring mode. First it drives a little distance, then it rotates 45 degrees and waits a while, this is repeated until it has rotated 360 degrees. When it does not receive coordinates it drives a little further and scans again. When it does find coordinates at any time it rotates towards the lake using the function described in a post below, and starts driving towards the lake. If the rover gets new coordinates it does a correcting steer action and drives further towards the lake. When a lake is detected using the middle light sensor the temperature is measured and sent back to the earth computer. Of course, edge detection is always on to keep the rover from driving off an edge. When moving away from an edge the rover rotates to the right or left randomly to avoid getting stuck in an infinite loop of edge avoidance.

Source code (.zip)

Strategy code (web-viewable)