This is a toy/robotics project... make a racing game using remote-controlled toy cars versus autonomous robotic cars. racing on a track that is projected on the floor using one of those little pocket laser projectors. The autonomous vehicles follow the projected tracks. Players can therefore design their own tracks in an image editor rather than buying expensive Scalextric type tracks. (We'd set a standard colour scheme for track edges or lane markings)

The cars should be configurable to be remote-controlled or AI on demand, like Anki Drive, except you design and build your own using arduino, raspberry pi, whatever takes your fancy. There's already a big robot/toy car kit community, so adding a standardised track projection to that shouldn't be a big step.
-- gtoal, Jul 31 2015

Laser Flare Path Laser_20Flare_20Path
Prior Art [8th of 7, Jul 31 2015]

The sensors on line tracking robots track a line on the floor. A projected line would shine on the floor, but would be blocked by the robot itself. The sensors wouldn't have a line to track, and would only be able to see the shadow of the robot.

For this to work, you would need to redesign the sensors
-- evilpenguin, Jul 31 2015


evilpenguin: I wasn't suggesting that existing robots would work directly - we'd have to design new ones, but the technology is very similar. You could either look ahead with a camera, or have some sort of light sensor bar on top that detected the laser directly. Implementation details. Anyway most line following robots are not designed for speed, so new ones would need to be built for that reason alone.
-- gtoal, Jul 31 2015



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