I recently started going back to projects I did a few years ago. The obstacle avoiding robot was my very first Arduino project, but looking at it on the shelf in my robot workshop, I felt that it had to be more pleasing to the eye. It really was a mess of wires, so I decided to fix it. The photo below shows the original model.
I used the original platform, but having learned from experience that it drives better when the jockey wheel is at the back, I decided to switch the orientation. I also got rid of the heavy lead acid battery and replaced it with a more efficient pair of Lithium cells. In stead of the big breadboard for the motor controller, I used an Adafruit motor shield, to make things more compact. Here is the result:
I had to use the Arduino’s analog pins as digital pins, because the Adafruit shield uses most of the digital pins. It is a neat trick I learned, If you call A0 = 14, A1 = 15, A2 = 16 and so on, you can use them as normal digital pins. At first I tried to make the robot work with only the ultrasonic sensor, but the results were mediocre. I therefore added 3Â infrared sensor modules and rewrote the algorithm to use them as well. The result was much more professional.
Here is the robot with the sensors added in front:
Here it is in action:
