Arduino Robotics

Chapter 5. Wally the Wall-Bot

In the previous chapter, I showed you a simple use of infrared sensors to detect the color variations of the floor surface and choose a direction accordingly. Although an IR sensing robot is autonomous, you must place a line on the ground for the bot to follow. Using a different type of sensor called an Ultrasonic range finder, you can measure distances from 6 inches to 25 feet. In this chapter, we create a robot named Wally (Figure 5-1) that uses these sensors to autonomously navigate around a room without touching anything other than the floor.

First we build a homemade motor-controller on perforated prototyping board, using N-channel and P-channel mosfets to form a dual H-bridge. We then modify the base of a dual ...