Workshop on Making Line Follower Robot

Throughout my years at DUET, I ran a series of hands-on workshops for new members of the DUET Robotics Club. Each workshop lasted three to five days and was designed for students who knew nothing about robotics, so we always started from the fundamentals.

The training began with the basics of electronics and C programming, then moved on to microcontroller programming with the Arduino platform. Participants learned to design circuits and test them in Proteus simulation before building any hardware. That way they understood how their robot would behave before they picked up a soldering iron.

The hands-on sessions brought everything together. Working in small groups, participants wired microcontrollers, motor drivers and geared DC motors, wrote and uploaded their own programs, and built and tuned a basic line follower robot by the end of the workshop.

As lead trainer, I designed the course and led the sessions, drawing on my experience of building competition robots with DUET Robo Express. The photos here are from the first day of the workshop that began on 19 May 2017, in which the club's new members performed exceptionally well.

These workshops became the starting point for many of the club's competitors. A number of the members trained in them went on to build their own competition robots and win titles at national robotics competitions, carrying forward the DUET Robotics Club's record of success.