Overview

Inspired by the concept of the old trackball computer mouse, which a user slides around to control the movement of a cursor, we decided to build an analog of it with one exception: the movement of our “mouse” is determined by the placement of our “cheese”. Essentially, our device is programmed to seek out its target and move toward it.

For simplicity and practical purpose, we limited the motion of our robot to only lateral and 45 degree diagonal motions without any rotation. With our cheese emitting infrared light within a range of about 4 feet, our robot is able to move towards it and stop when the infrared detector is approximately 2 inches from the LED emitter. If the cheese moves, then our robot mouse will follow it until it reaches the cheese or stops when the cheese is no longer within detection radius.