08-08-2012, 01:05 PM
Computer Automation of machine: Microcontroller Interfaced Robot Car
1)Computer Automation of machine.doc (Size: 1.27 MB / Downloads: 66)
PROBLEM DEFINITION & DESCRIPTION:
Recently a snake like robot was developed for rescuing people caught up inside rummage of buildings during earthquake or other seismic activities. This robot could make its way through the debris of collapsed buildings until it finds some victims and then attempted a rescue mission. The robot could identify between the objects and human body using IR sensors and almost all terrains, and utilizes the concepts of a line follower.
Line follower is a machine that can follow a path. The path can be visible like a black line on a white surface (or vice-versa) or it can be invisible like a magnetic field.
Sensing a line and maneuvering the robot to stay on course, while constantly correcting wrong moves using feedback mechanism forms a simple yet effective closed loop system. As a programmer we get an opportunity to ‘teach’ the robot how to follow the line thus giving it a human-like property of responding to stimuli.
The US department of defense designed a tank with all its features like bombardment, 3-D viewing, can’t be detected by radars and all other advanced features with the only difference that it wasn’t run by a human being sitting inside a tank. It was run by persons sitting in a high-tech lab and monitoring every movement of the tank in the field. This saved the loss of eminent army personnel. This can be done with every electronic or electric appliance. The simple concept behind the technology was to control the equipment with the help of computer programming.
A machine can be controlled and run with the help of parallel ports available in the computer. Our project tries to combine the features of both parallel port programming and line follower machine to create a robot car which can not only work automatically taking its own selection for the path to traverse, but also it can be controlled manually to enforce better decisions in case of a predicament.
HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENT:
HARDWARE REQUIREMENT:
1. Robot Car Kit & Wireless Controller Circuit
2. Parallel Port Connector
3. 9 Volt Battery
4. Pentium 166 Mhz or higher
5. Keyboard or Mouse
SCOPE AND MAJOR OBJECTIVES OF PROJECT:
The Aim of the project is to design a robot car based on micro controller interfaced with IR Devices for analyzing the path and interfacing with a parallel port to provide the manual overriding.
The automatic robot car can take all decisions regarding the choice of speed, change in direction and other such control related decision completely on its own. However, if the car gets caught up in certain adverse situation such as a loop in the path or a dead end, then the manual control can be used to overcome such difficulties. Further, we can manually decide a particular path which the microcontroller is bound to take unless there is some change in the path.
Data transmission through parallel port has following advantages:
1. Eight bits can be programmed simultaneously.
2. Faster communication as compared with the serial port.
The major disadvantage of the parallel port is that it can’t be used for long distance communication. If the distance of data transmission is extended too far then the transmission may lead to erroneous results. But, this limitation is ruled out by the use of wireless remote controlled car.