Baobot

Baobot is my team's entry into the AFRON Design Competition. It is a 2-wheeled design intended for classroom use as a way to teach middle and high school students about electronics, programming, and robotics.

Baobot is capable of USB tethered control (via serial console) and autonomous control. In autonomous mode, the robot will roam around until one of the whiskers are hit. If a front whisker is hit, the robot backs up, turns left or right, and moves forward again. If a rear whisker is hit while moving backward, the robot moves forward. An optional line following sensor board can be added to the front, which allows the robot to follow a dark line on a light background.

A battery pack (3x AA batteries) can be added as well. The main chassis and battery pack each have 4 small magnets, which allow the battery pack to snap in to place. The battery pack is plugged in to the main board via USB cable, which turns the robot on. Once powered, the robot will begin executing whatever program has been loaded on the microcontroller.

Baobot is based on Sparkfun's Arduino Pro Micro, meaning that it is Arduino compatible.

For more information, check out http://baobot.org/

To download our open source design package, go to https://code.google.com/p/baobot/

Line follow, Navigate with front and rear bump sensors, Remote control via USB connection

  • Actuators / output devices: Plastic gear motors
  • Control method: Serial port over USB tether
  • CPU: Atmel ATMega32U4
  • Operating system: Arduino
  • Power source: 3 AA cells, USB
  • Programming language: Arduino, C
  • Sensors / input devices: bump whiskers, IR reflectance sensors
  • Target environment: indoor

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/baobot

We also did submit one robot

We also did submit one robot to AFRON. Well, good to see to have treal competitors :wink:

Anyway, besides this, great little robot and good start for kids i guess.

AFRON

Awesome! I’m glad to hear that more people have submitted. We were only able to find a few other websites through Google. Which bot did you submit? Do you mind sharing? We’re curious what other people have done :slight_smile:

Yep, we did also track down

sorry wrong place…

Yep, we did also track down

Yep, we did also track down some others, but indeed, not easy to find.

I did not submit the robot by myself since it’s a team project in our hackerspace. Founded on my idea to build a robot swarm out of scratch we grouped some members and started brainstorming/developing. This is the current result: Swarm Robots

Good luck for your entry!!!

sensors

You can give me the name of the reflective sensors that you used on this project?