November 7, 2006 - Pushkar

Project Mantis is officially on it's way and we have preety much decided on the further development of Prithvi. Actually, we have decided to make a new complier for a language called as C--. Ya, C--. It is intermediate between C and ASM and hence the name, C--.

I have seen and written some applications in C--. It is awesome. It is fast and it is easy to write. You can even make things like mp3 players and chat using Win32 dlls. We compiled a library for the parallel port as a demonstration for our Project vivas today.

I decided that we should have more than just simple parallel port driven robot for the demo. That is when I decided to write this program in MATLAB, that could trace the red dot of a laser. I simply made a laser follower robot, unlike a line follower :) The results were simply awesome. Have a look at these videos.

• Video The MATLAB interface for laser dot tracer. It is following the red light of a optical mouse.
• Video Prithvi following a laser. (Camera is onboard the robot)