My final project for Advanced Mechatronics was developing a robot to compete in a basketball tournament. I wrote the entire navigation system in Arduino using a finite state machine. Below you can see a video of the robot orienting itself in the court and navigating to a black cross denoting a shooting point. Our shooting mechanism was an electric linear actuator that we charged with a bank of 4 capacitors (see picture). In order to store enough energy to shoot, we needed to use a boost converter to up the voltage from our battery to our capacitor bank. While this proved to be a design challenge, the end result was a consistent shooting mechanism that was able to fire across a room (see video)