IDP 2024

In the IDP autonomous robotics competition, teams start with raw materials, an Arduino and very limited sensors to design and build a delivery robot to navigate a maze and sort through parcels to delivery them to the right locations.

Note

We were the only team to achieve a 100% score!

The Cambridge University Engineering Department published a YouTube video of us accomplishing this.

Software theory

There are a few main theoretical components of the robot software:

• a PID control loop with first-order derivative filtering
• precomputed pathfinding using the A* algorithm
• an event loop which executes tasks based on the robot and game state singletons

All the C++ code was intentionally structured using modern design patterns to be composable, object-oriented, and easy to understand.

Prerequisites

• The ArxContainer library, which can be installed using the Arduino library manager.

Dev notes

• Since this is an Arduino project, the main file must be named idp.ino, the same as the git folder.
• Also, the C++ standard library is not available, so we have to use libraries specifically compatible with Arduino.
• The .vscode/ folder has been included with some settings that may be useful for development under VSCode. Any files that are machine-specific have been excluded from the repository using .gitignore.

Here's a video we took while prototyping the robot: