Mobile mini robot

Research and development of the last years not only resulted in small microcomputers with higher performance but also in highly integrated sensors and actuators. Designing very small intelligent devices such as miniaturized intelligent autonomous systems is thus becoming possible. The Institute of Robotics of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich (ETH) recently started exploring the field of mobile mini robots with on board intelligence and power supply. The goal of several master student projects was to design a mobile mini robot with on board intelligence and power supply. The robot's intelligence is based on a PIC16C84 micro controller and powered by two small watch batteries. Its actuators are watch type stepping motors which are geared down by 1: 60. The motor coils are directly connected to the output of the micro controller. At the moment two different robots have been realized. One can follow a black line on white ground. The second can follow a wall and can simultaneously be teleoperated by a joy-stick. The wireless unipolar communication from the joy-stick to the robot allows to feed the robot with a global path. The local infrared reflection sensors allow to keep the robot at a constant distance from the wall. The control software is written in Assembly and allows sampling times up to a couple kHz