To design a system to control an electronic mouse to follow a track in the quickest time was a challenging design. Having looked at many different design ideas and reducing the project into manageable stages allowing the team to work together on different stages and contribute to each one the challenge could be completed. Once the final design was built and tested there were notable flaws in the design that could have been changed using different circuits. The sensors were not as responsive as would have been liked but either by using the alternative sensor circuit or another control system the response could have been improved. Less power would have been lost in the alternative circuit as there was no full wave rectifier using a lot of voltage. Using a differential amplifier the voltages of each sensor circuit could have been subtracted from each other therefore the difference between the voltages would have been greatly increased. This would have increased the sensitivity and control of the circuit. With more responsive sensor circuits the mouse could have been sped up.

The mechanical hill control provided enough current for the motors to reach the top of the hill. However a better speed control for the mouse could have been introduced as the mouse was still very slow up the hill. The speed control could have also been used to control the speed of the mouse down the hills to ensure that the mouse did not loosed direction control by going to fast when gravity took affect. The bidirectional motor drive circuit would have needed to be introduced therefore increasing the number of batteries but his would have been coped with by the speed control.

The mouse used guidance control to follow the track and implemented a mechanical hill control (the pendulum). The mouse could follow the track showing the design works. However there are ways to increase the speed of the mouse by introducing another control system or changing the design of the mouse. The front wheel steering chassis has the potential to go faster but requires more power to drive around the circuit. It also requires the implementation of discrete time control implementation which means the design would be very different. The mouse could have been improved in some areas to improve its performance but the mouse met its specification and therefore proved to be a good design.

Working as a group to design, build and test the mouse proved extremely useful as the each member provided expertise in certain areas. Each member helped in the build and testing of each stage of the mouse project. The final design of the sensor circuit was achieved and built by me. The final motor drive circuit was designed and tested by Ollie. The build of the mouse was also contributed by Ollie. Crispus contributed towards a hill control system and helped in the build of circuits on bread board and testing. The decisions for choosing each circuit design was decided upon as a group based upon testing of each stage. This led to the completion of the mouse to the design specified in the investigation.