Some members of the Botball team decided to look into search patterns.  Since we don't know exactly where we will find Helium-3, the robot will have to navigate a search pattern.  Our plan is have the rocket team deliver our rover to a safe area, then drive 500 meters northeast to an empty field, where we will conduct our drilling. We did a little research and decided that the robot should use a spiral search pattern [13] [14]. A square spiral search pattern looked like another possibility [15].

We decided to take an existing robot with camera and program it to see what the code would look like.  We also wanted to see if we could record the actual search pattern.  We pointed the camera down at the table and added a marker pen to the front of the robot.  Here is what it looks like.

We reprogrammed the robot to go in a spiral looking for orange puff balls. The code is here.  When it finds an orange ball, it stops and makes a mark.  We then remove the ball and the robot will go on searching.  Here is how we set it up to look for 3 balls.

We ran the experiment several times. Here is a video of the final run. And here is a picture of the pattern it traced.

Developing a good search pattern turned out to be harder than we had originally thought. But we believe that we can solve the problem with math and good programming.