Tag Archives: robot

Making a Line Sensor using IR Receiver

A line follower robot, or a LFR in short, is a simple autonomous robot that optically tracks a line made on the surface of the floor. That means you have an arbitrary line drawn on the floor and the robot tracks it by moving right along it! The line is sensed using a piece of hardware called a line sensor. A line sensor can be easily made using a low cost IR Rx/Tx pair. The IR Rx emmits IR radiation and the Rx helps in receiving the waves. See the figure below for working of line sensor. Working of Line Sensor Schematic for Line Sensor. Line Sensor Schematic   Actual IR Rx Tx Pair. Line Sensor Array. Actually a group of such sensor units as described above is required to make a line follower robot. We generally use 3 or 5 such sensor unit to make a line sensor array. The complete steps are described below. You need small piece of veroboard (general purpose PCB). Actual IR Rx Tx Pair. We will fit the sensor at the castor mount of the metal chassis. So we carefully mark the location we need drilling. Mark drilling location.   Mark the drilling location. You can make the hole easily by using a pair of scissor. Just press and rotate. Make hole using scissor. […]

PC Controlled Robot

In this tutorial we will discuss a simple PC controlled robot. The Robot PC link will be a RS232 serial line. The robot will have only five commands. Move forward (RS232 char ‘F’ or ‘f’) Move backward (RS232 char ‘B’ or ‘b’) Turn Left (RS232 char ‘L’ or ‘l’) Turn Right (RS232 char ‘R’ or ‘r’) Stop (RS232 char ‘S’ or ‘s’) To keep things as simple as possible, in this example we will use terminal software RealTerm for sending commands to the robot. Later on a dedicated software can be written on PC end to control the robot. The Robot’s Hardware The robot’s hardware will be a simple differential drive using two 200RPM DC Gear motor mounted on a HQ Metal Chassis with a front castor wheel. On the back motors we have mounted plastic wheels. More about differential drive is explained in this tutorial. Gear Motors   Wheels   Metal Chassis   Remove motor’s nut   Insert the motor   Fasten the nuts again   Both motors installed   Front Castor wheel   Installing the front castor   Mounting hole for wheels screw   Mounting the wheels   Chassis is ready! The Electronics The robot is controlled using xBoard v2.0 which has ATmega32 as main CPU and integrated motor drivers. We have connected xBoard v2.0 with PC using […]