Inside the BeatBot an Arduino reads 9 infrared sensors for line detection at 100 samples a second. A digital servo controls the Ackerman steering mechanism to follow the line on the track or floor.

If you wanted to make a fancy line-following robot that could handle 5-way intersections and barcode commands this would be a no-brainer. We’ve seen other smart cameras like OpenMV before.

An Arduino-based robot for people who don’t know how to build robots "Sparki" ideal for teaching kids (or adults) how to program robots.

But the BeatBot is a programmable, self-driving, line-following robot made to push runners by giving them a real visual target to beat. Kind of like dog racing for humans.