Rover Solution

Pre-requisites

The Rover solution was built in C#, using .NET Framework 4.7.1 and Visual Studio 2017.

Solution

The Rover solution contains the following 3 projects:

1. Rover: This project contains the core solution. The main solution was designed using a command design pattern - It is meant to be extensible in that new commands can be easily added and mapped to instruction text.

2. Rover.Test This project contains all of the unit tests for Rover. The unit tests were built using MSTest - and can be run within Visual studio.

3. Rover.Demo This is a console application that will allow you to issue commands to the rover. You can run this application from Visual Studio (be sure to set this as the startup project) or via the dist executable (refer below to Running the Solution)

Running the Solution

Refer to the 'dist' directory in the packaged solution. You can run the Rover Console application by double clicking on the exe file named 'Rover.Demo.exe' - this will allow you to issue commands and interact with the rover application. Alternatively you can run the solution from within Visual Studio also - selecting Rover.Demo as the Startup project.

Assumptions

• Validation has been applied when moving the rover to ensure it stays within the bounds of the plateau. Therefore if a move command is issued that is out of bounds, it will be ignored.
• For simplicity the Demo application issues commands directly to the core Rover solution - therefore user validation and instruction parsing logic was kept to a minimum as there is no direct user entry.

THE PROBLEM

A squad of robotic rovers are to be landed by NASA on a plateau on Mars. This plateau, which is curiously rectangular, must be navigated by the rovers so that their on-board cameras can get a complete view of the surrounding terrain to send back to Earth.

A rover's position and location is represented by a combination of x and y co-ordinates and a letter representing one of the four cardinal compass points. The plateau is divided up into a grid to simplify navigation. An example position might be 0, 0, N, which means the rover is in the bottom left corner and facing North.

In order to control a rover, NASA sends a simple string of letters. The possible letters are L, R and M. L and R makes the rover spin 90 degrees left or right respectively, without moving from its current spot. M means move forward one grid point, and maintains the same heading. Assume that the square directly North from (x, y) is (x, y+1).

INPUT

The first line of input is the upper-right coordinates of the plateau, the lower-left coordinates are assumed to be 0,0.

The rest of the input is information pertaining to the rovers that have been deployed. Each rover has two lines of input. The first line gives the rover's position, and the second line is a series of instructions telling the rover how to explore the plateau. The position is made up of two integers and a letter separated by spaces, corresponding to the x and y co-ordinates and the rover's orientation. Each rover will be finished sequentially, which means that the second rover won't start to move until the first one has finished moving.

OUTPUT

The output for each rover should be its final co-ordinates and heading.

INPUT AND OUTPUT

Test Input:
5 5
1 2 N
LMLMLMLMM
3 3 E
MMRMMRMRRM

Expected Output:
1 3 N
4 1 E (* i.e. ignores out of bounds move command)

THE SOLUTION

Write a program which will solve the Mars Rover problem as described above. Do not spend more than an hour on this program. Don’t worry if you don’t finish it. We’re more interested in how you approach the solution from a coding perspective. There are countless solutions to this problem online so it will be pretty obvious if you copy one of these from the Internet. You can approach this problem however you like and output the result in any way you see fit.

We will also be looking at certain aspects of your code such as:

• Completeness
• Readability and coding style
• Coding standards
• Project structure