In an open-ended design course teams of up to 5 students were challenged to create a robot that can get past a 3ft tall wall, detect a post, and drive to it.

My team designed a system with a higher-powered robot that has free-spinning magnetic arms that pull the robot into the wall, then higher torque wheels drive the robot up and over the wall.

Once the robot was over the wall a part of the arm would hit the ground and disconnect the magnets from the wall allowing the robot to drive away. A directional LiDAR was then used to detect larger differences in distances to guide the robot to the pole.

The biggest issue the robot had was gaining too much speed and disconnecting the magnets when the robot was moving from the top of the wall to the far side descent. The robot was very reliable for finding the target and multiple full successful runs were completed.