Designing, making, and using a mobile robot

Describes the building and control of a mobile robot which is capable of navigating in a well defined workspace by means of generating an optimal trajectory. The basic control architecture of the mobile robot is implemented with a combination of an MC68HC11 microcontroller and a personal computer. The kinematics of the proposed differential impulse is analyzed which allow us to select the appropriate steering DC motors and speed measurement requirements of the system. The motor control is performed by a PWM scheme and PI controllers. A path planning stage finds the optimal trajectory, taking a graphical description of the workspace and using potential fields and dynamic programming to solve the optimization problem and avoid the obstacles. Clearly there are two specific problems: building a complete device that will allow having an electric powered robot and the use of these resources to obtain controlled and collision-free movement in a real workspace