COMPUTER-CONTROLLED MOBILE ROBOT

There are many applications for a small vehicle which is capable of mo ving from place to place in a limited area under digital electronic co ntrol. The exact manner in which the information required to control t he motion of the vehicle reaches the onboard computer will vary with t he specific application. So also the payload on the vehicle (which wil l generally have to be some form of robot) will obviously depend on th e specific duty if tile machine is to transport some (possibly toxic) chemical from one part of a processing plant to another, the payload w ill be a tank fitted with valves which are to be controlled by the onb oard computer. In this case the vehicle could possibly be programmed t o follow a buried guide cable or even a painted line with bar codes to signal specific locations. If the requirement is for a roving eye for monitoring of a rocket launch or some such potentially hazardous oper ation, the pay load would be a TV camera on a pan and tilt held contro lled by the onboard computer, and the vehicle would be guided from a r emote location by a human operator through radio. These are just a cou ple of examples from a possible multitude of applications where the co mmon factor is the computer controlled mobile robot. In order to provi de economic simple solution it is desirable that modular concept is ad opted and based on the demand it should be feasible to try out differe nt sub-system modules and finally offering the total solution to the r equirement. The attempt has been made to conceptualize, design and dev elop one such proto-type which can be adopted to propagate the modular concept. This paper discusses an approach to the design of the mobile platform which can form the base of many types of mobile robotic mach ines. One such modular Mobile Robot proto-type has been developed unde r TDC programme of Department of Electronics.