This website’s purpose is to chronicle a project done for a mechanical engineering class in mechatronics at Northwestern University .  The assignment was to build a robot that had some sort of sensors and some sort of actuated device.  This is a very broad scope for a project.  We had 5 weeks to do it in and up to a $200 budget.  For our project we chose to do an automatic line following robot, The Dirt Rascal.

This robot is basically a dust buster mounted on a frame with motors, wheels, line following circuitry and a computer controller chip.  Its function is to follow a line and vacuum the floor as it does it.  The Dirt Rascal has many unique features, including automatic line color sensing and an obstacle detection sensing.  It can be used on either black or white floors and allows the user to remove the Dirt Devil for manual use.  Details of the robot’s sensing capabilities can be found in the electronics section. The controlling code and logic is detailed in the programming section.  For more information on the physical design, see the mechanical section.

Our team is comprised of 3 Student all of whom are juniors; Katie Russell an Electrical Engineer, Dan Sheehan and Lucas Rogers both Mechanical Engineers.