DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A MOBILE ROBOT

Mobile robot nowadays has been used in various sectors of business ranged from
sciences and industries to servicing and entertainment, and has posed very unique
challenges to the researcher. Due to its autonomous nature, it requires an extensive
sensing system to read the surrounding working environment, sufficient controller
for data processing and decision-making, and also a very stable actuator system to
actuate the robot response with respect to the working environment changes.
This report details the final year project of designing and implementing an
autonomous wheel-based mobile robot, which has a capability to navigate according
to a predetermined path while avoiding any obstacle on its route. It is also equipped
with small manipulator to enable simple pick and place action: picking a small
object from a predefined location and placing it at another predetermined location on
the floor. Hence, in order for it to do all those task, the robot fundamentally consists
of four main building functional blocks: (1) Navigation (2) Position tracking (3)
Obstacle detection and avoidance (4) Manipulator & gripper control block (Since the
robot movement is based on a predetermined plan, the path planner block is skipped
in this project).
For further improvement, some fine-tuning on the manipulator structure and
programming, as well as the development of a user interface to enable to user to
select the robot movement path are highly recommended. In summary, the project
has been successfully completed, providing a basement for future mobile robot
development in UTP.