Why build a Robot?
Quite simply, they are fun and rewarding. You'll feel a great sense of achievement watching your creation move around autonomously, interacting with its environment. Our robot will be a wheeled robot, and will be able to move around a room avoiding obstacles, reacting to light and dark, and responding to any commands you might give it.
The topics that we'll be covering will allow you to do a lot more than only build robots; a robot is the perfect project to pull together a host of extremely useful principles and technologies - sensing the physical environment through contact and non-contact means, sensing light, driving motors and servos, producing visual and audio output, understanding infrared remote control, and others. From here, the options are endless.
More on the Robot Design
To whet your appetite, let's look at our ultimate goal in a little more detail.
We'll be building a robot with 3 wheels - well, really 2 wheels and a free-moving castor. Robots like this are structurally simpler to build, as they steer simply by varying the relative speed of the 2 driving wheels. This allows us to focus on the electrical design of the robot without straying into mechanical complexities.
The robot will have two key ways to sense its environment and avoid obstacles - an ultrasonic sensor which can sense obstacles at a distance, and contact sensors that detect obstacles out of the ultrasonic sensor's field of vision. Think of these as the eyes and the whiskers of the robot. There is a fair amount of logic that goes into these, along with the course of action that the robot takes to avoid the obstacles once they've been detected. In order to improve the robot's field of vision, we'll mount the ultrasonic sensor on a platform that scans left and right.
To give us more control, we'll include an infrared module. This will allow us to override the obstacle avoidance system, and keep our robot safe while we test our obstacle avoidance logic. Once the basics are in place, we'll add some bells and whistles to the robot. The robot will become more interactive by indicating its intentions through light and sound, as well as react to the light levels in which it operates.
Finally, once we've built all of this using the Arduino system, we'll build our own controller board without relying on the Arduino board itself - essentially we'll build our own Arduino. If we were developing a commercial product, this would be the end of the initial prototype phases and the start of building the beta product.
