A Robot That won’t Lose its Bearings

Creating a robot capable of following an exact course without needing any external physical help — like a line marked on the ground, for example — has for a long time been a very tricky operation to achieve. Thanks to the boom in amateur robotics on the one hand, and to the development of new sensors on the other, it is today possible to make robots with functions that only a few years ago would have seemed more like science fiction. And this is just what we’re proposing now, with the construction of a robot capable of detecting terrestrial magnetic North, and hence to follow any angular direction with respect to that, exactly as you would find your bearings using a compass. To do this, it uses a successor to the good old needle compass, in the form of a module made by Devantech called a CMP03 (or CMPS03, depending on versions and documents).