Control System of a Semi-Autonomous Mobile Robot*

In this paper, a control system, which has been designed for a semi-autonomous mobile robot, is presented. The robot has been developed as a part of a teaching aid. The teaching aid is aimed at practice of a path-planning theory. The main purpose of the robot within the teaching aid is physical execution of a path-plan scheduled by a high-level control system. The execution of path-plans is required to be accomplished by the robot autonomously, hence the 'semi-autonomous' appellation. The robot is based on an Arduino UNO microcontroller board. The robot acquires information about his workspace via reflectance sensors, encoders, and a magnetometer sensor. Since all these sensors provide only very limited information about the workspace, all the acquired data has to be used with utmost effectiveness. Thus, processing of the sensor data and multi-sensor integration is also considered in this paper.