In order to gain more hands-on robotics and mechatronics experience, in my junior year at Purdue, I took a graduate level course, ME 588: Mechatronics. We learned passive and active electronics, analog and digital interfacing, A/D conversion, PWM, Finite State Machines, DC motors, sensor integration, serial communication protocols and etc in the first half of the semester. In the final project, we were divided into teams of four to design and manufacture a fully autonomous robot to complete certain tasks, such as line following, ball detection, ball identification, ball collection, and ball deposit into their certain assigned boxes. In this project, I mainly focused on Arduino code integration and was responsible for designing the finite state machine of the robot and programming line following, motor driving and ball identification with Arduino. 

Final Robot Competition