5 min readSommay Khanna
What a line-following robot actually teaches you
The sensor array is the easy part. Everything interesting happens in the tuning — and in what breaks when the track surface changes.
- Robotics
- Competition
A line follower looks like a solved problem. Read the line, steer towards it, repeat. The first version works in the living room and fails on the competition track, and the gap between those two outcomes is where the actual engineering lives.
Lighting changes the sensor readings. A surface with a slight sheen reflects differently from matte tape. A gain that is stable at low speed oscillates at high speed. None of this appears in the tutorial — it appears the first time you run on a track you did not build.
The lesson that carried into every project since: calibrate against the environment you will actually run in, and treat every constant in the code as something that will need re-tuning, not as a fact.
More writing
6 min read
Building LLM automation that does not quietly break
A model that is right 90% of the time is not 90% useful if you cannot tell which 10% went wrong.
- AI
- Automation
7 min read
Designing a rescue robot around constraints, not features
Power budget, radio range and payload weight decide the architecture. The feature list comes afterwards.
- Robotics
- Engineering