This thesis presents the characterization of a line follower robot for the summer school of mechanical engineering. The robot uses supercapacitors instead of batteries as a power source. In some aspects, supercapacitors differ qualitatively from batteries and the purpose of this thesis is to assess those differences and optimize the robot's programming.
The rate of self-discharge and the course of supercapacitors' voltage over time spent driving and distance driven are estimated with voltage measurements. The program is optimized with manual tuning of the PID control loop.
The measurements indicate, that when using supercapacitors as an autonomous robot's powersource, it is simple to achieve behavior similar to that of a battery. Quantitative differences between supercapacitors and batteries remain. Supercapacitors have a by at least an order of magnitude lower stored energy density than batteries and a by about an order of magniture higher charge and discharge power density.
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