It has been some time since a worked on this robot. This is a video of me building and installing the main PCB on the robot. The video was actually recorded several months ago, but now I recently found the inspiration to continue to work on this project.

The main board has an Arduino Due that controls the two stepper motors that drive the wheels. The PCB also has a lot of other features including servo outputs/inputs, MOSFET outputs, bumper sensor inputs, 6 DOF IMU (gyro and accelerometer), a few buttons and LEDs, and a couple of other things. In the video, I connect an RC receiver the servo inputs on the board and drive the robot abound using remote control.

The future plans for this robot are to implement a serial interface in the Arduino Due, and then connect it the Rasberry Pi. That way the Rasberry Pi will be able the drive the stepper motors and also read data from the IMU and other sensors. Then I can make a python script or something running on the Pi that gives the robot some interesting behaviors.

I also plan a replacing the Time Of Flight LIDAR sensor mounted on the stepper motor seen in the video with a rotating Laser sensor instead. The problem with the Time Of Flight sensor is that it has a very limited range and sampling time. I recently found out about the rotating Laser Distance Sensor (LDS) used on Xiaomi robot vacuum cleaner robots. It is available for cheap as a replacement part the vacuum robots. There is also an open source project to control the spinning of the sensor an read data from it, which should make it relatively easy to connect to the Rasberry Pi in my robot.