In this project, an autonomous mobile robot has been designed and constructed. The robot is equipped with two dc motors from Maxon Motor, each controlled independently by two LM629 Precision Motion Controllers from National Semiconductor. A hierarchical control strategy has been adopted, with a 300MHz Geode processor embedded PC from Arcom Control Systems as the main computer overseeing the top level of the hierarchy. The embedded PC is running on the Windows CE operating system. The system is being expanded to incorporate a number of sensors for obstacle detection and self-localization.
Click CLIP 1 or CLIP 2 to watch video clips of the robot in action.