Computer Engineering project. We had write code for a small robot to navigate through a boobytrapped maze, with limited sensors. The robot that was to reach the end of the maze and navigate back to the start again the fastest, would win. The idea was to use the sensors to keep track of it's position and orientation and use that data to form a graph of the maze. The idea was ambitious to begin with, especially with the horrible hardware we had to work with.
In other words, 3 robots that didnt work properly at all. The one we ended up with started to break down too, 2 days before THE day. We got a replacement robot, which was of an older make and had about 10% of the storage compared to the previous one. We found out that the C++ STL headers are quite huge. Plan... Rewrite 5000 lines of code, using only C in 2 days time. It worked pretty well in our own boobytrapped test maze we made, but upon seeing the actual maze on the showday, we ditched all the code and replaced it with more or less 2 lines of code.
- Move forward for a random amount of time
- rotate in a random direction
... We won!