A semi-autonomous mobile robot for education and research

This paper presents the development, implementation, and testing of a semi-autonomous robotic platform, which may potentially be used for educational and research purposes. Educational purposes include: teaching the student how to design a stable electromechanical platform, exploring different types of sensors to navigate around any obstacles, interfacing different electronic components to a microcontroller, and demonstrating how to program the microcontroller chip in order to control a robotic platform. Research purposes include: developing and investigating the performance of different control algorithms to achieve behaviour analysis and obstacles avoidance. A modular hardware design is implemented using I2C bus to interface different sensors and motor drivers to the ATMEL microcontroller chip (AVR ATmega32). The hardware is integrated in one application board as embedded system design. The software is developed using C-compiler (ImageCraft) and a top-down approach is adopted to design different software modules. Experimental results are given to demonstrate the potential of the developed hardware and software modules.