4. 3pi Robots With Additional Electronics

Line Following With Gaps and Obstacles

This 3pi robot, customized and programmed by Jan Matas, can follow a black line with sharp corners, gaps, and obstacles. The text translates to: “We have seen many robots that try to follow a black line. And how have they performed? Sadly… But today, the revolution is here. Hello my name is Pololu 3pi. I am the robot preparing for Robocup jr. 2010 in category rescue.”

3pi as a Wall-Following Robot

This video shows a 3pi robot that uses two Sharp distance sensors to follow walls on its left and drive around obstacles in its way. Please see our sample project for information on how to make your own 3pi wall follower.

3pi Pool Racer at LVBots Challenge 4.5

This competition pits multiple robots against each other on the same course. The goal is to be the fastest to complete three laps around the obstacles.

Radio-Controlled 3pi

This video shows a 3pi robot being controlled via signals from a two-channel RC receiver. Please see our sample project for more information on how to make your own RC 3pi.

3pi Fire Fighter

This video, uploaded by myblack60impala, shows the first place entrant in the St. Louis Robotics FIRE mini comp, a small scale fire fighting competition.

Collision-Avoiding 3pis

This video shows a school project by Group 9 at University West (Trollhättan, SWEDEN) in fall 2009. The 3pis use Sharp distance sensors to simultaneously run on the same line and maze courses without colliding.

Another Wall-Following 3pi

This video shows the final version of a school project to turn a 3pi robot into a wall follower using two side-looking long-range sharp distance sensors and a front-looking sonar sensor. For more information, please see Mathew’s 3pi blog, which tracks the progress of the project and provides source code and pictures.

Home-made m3pi Controlled by Bluetooth Keyboard

Kazuhiro Ouchi mounts an ARM mbed development board on a 3pi expansion board and uses it to receive commands from a Bluetooth keyboard and send serial commands to a serial-slave 3pi. He wrote an mbed notebook page (in Japanese).

Micromouse 3pi

Terry, also known as lufamseed, made this Micromouse 3pi robot by that uses distance sensors and encoders along with a flood-fill algorithm to find the shortest path through a walled maze.

Walled Maze Solver 3pi

Brian Jones made this walled maze solver 3pi robot using distance sensors.

3pi Sound Follower

Louie used three electret microphones and two 74HC4052 multiplexers to turn his 3pi into a sound follower. To find out more about his project, see Louie’s forum thread.