Linea - Line Follower

Linea is my first line follower based on Arduino.A line follower is a robot for beginners.

In fact it is very simple to build a line follower and only few components are required :

- a robot chassis

- IR sensors for line tracking (black or white line)

- two motors (servos or gear motors)

- an Arduino to drive the motors and to implement control logic

- Batteries, jumpers, screws and other hardware

If you use gear motors it is important to use also a motors driver, because Arduino can’t feed the motors with the high current required.

This robot was showed in the Arduino Day, in Rome (Italy), in April 2011 and use a Pololu sensor with 8 IR leds ( link), very cheap (14 euros). It is offered with an Arduino library, made by Pololu. This library resolves all the interfacing problems with Arduino (yeah!).

The robot chassis is build using a cheap DFRobot module that for less than 30 euros, offers also 2 gear motors, 2 motor supports and 2 wheels.

The motor driver is a Sparkfun module, very very cheap (8 euros), that can feed up to 1.2A. It supports 2 gear motors and lets the PWM usage. For my convenience I assembled the motor drivers on a breadboard shield, but it is enough a normal breadboard.

Others components (ball caster, sensor support, batteries) are self made or bought in an hardware shop.

Some information, images, code here: http://robottini.altervista.org/linea-line-follower/