Interfering robots

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello,

I'm new to Arduino, microprocessors and programming in general, so please forgive my ignorance.

I would like to make a robot project. The project is as follows:

A small robot is contained within a large area, perhaps within a rectangle with lines as a border. This robot (Bot1) attempts to 'draw' a predefined shape - say the outline of a human body. There is another robot contained within the rectangle (Bot2). This robot operates randomly but stays within the confines of the space. When Bot1 encounters Bot2, it adjusts/ modifies it's path and starts it's drawing again from the beginning. The objective is for Bot1 to complete it's drawing without interference from Bot2 - although I would like to design this to never happen and the project results in an endless run of started, and failed drawings.

Can anyone point me to sources of information where I might find:

  1. instructions/ tutorial on how to program/ make an arduino robot follow a predefined path - I have looked and find plenty of results for following lines, mazes, reacting to sensors, but I can't find anything for working with a predefined path

  2. would I need any specific hardware for this task i.e. stepper motors, rather than DC motors?

  3. how can I make Bot1 constantly 'look' for Bot2 around 360 degrees? Would this involve a circular array or IR sensors? - this sounds expensive and clumsy.

Any and all help would be very much appreciated. I'm having lots of fun with my arduino, but I am new, so please be patient if my questions seem stupid.

Best regards,
AW

2

You might do a google search on "line drawing robot" to look at existing solutions,
dozens of people have done this.

People normally use sonars or Sharp IR rangers to detect other robots. To avoid
too much expense, it's possible to mount several sensors on a panning servo bracket.

  • Parallax Ping sonar
  • Maxsonars
  • Sharp GP2D12, etc
3

For the 'predefined path' part you could have a hard-coded sequence of turns and straight lines which is reset when a collision is detected.

For the collision detection, you could just build a bumper around the 'bot which operates a switch when anything pushes on it. That way it would be operated by contact with the walls, or with the other 'bot.

4

Great! Thank you for your help. I'll track down information on bumper detection, and ways to code in turns and straight lines.

Thanks again!

5

Parallax makes an easy to program bot that can draw with a marker. It has sensors already mounted. It might be what you are looking for.

http://www.parallax.com/ScribblerFamily/tabid/825/Default.aspx