MyRIO Sheepdog Project

Technical skills: LabVIEW, PID controllers, Finite state machines

As part of the final project in ME 375: Measurement and Control Systems II, we had to build a sheepdog robot using a myRIO microcontroller. The specifications were:

• The robot should follow the middle line around the track
• The robot should automatically change to its herding behavior after one lap around the track
• The robot should dynamically adjust the distance between itself and a moving obstacle, maintaining a distance of 9”
• The robot should use closed-loop feedback mechanisms to control the wheel velocities

The robot’s operations were coded in LabVIEW using Control & Simulation Loops, with PI controllers to reduce the error between the desired and the measured wheel velocities. The operations within the line-following and herding behaviors were organized and coded using nested finite state machines. Our robot successfully exhibited the two behaviors and achieved the fifth fastest time in finishing two laps around the track. Our final report can be found below.