Project : Simple Human Following Robot

About 4 years ago, I programmed for fun my fire-fighting-robot, so it can follow people or thing in front of it. I called it Simple Human Following Robot. I've been posted the video on my YouTube.com channel and I got many questions from the viewer regarding the detail of my robot. Finally I decided to share about this simple and fun project to you.

Here you are.

As you can see in the video, the robot move following my steps. The key is that the robot detects thing/human in front of it and move backward or forward in order to keep the distance. While it lost the distance, it will scan its left or right.

Here I will share the overview and the detail of each part will be posted separately.

Basically, the robot consists of 4 components :
1. SENSOR ( input )
Sensor is the device that gives the ability to robot to understand the environment. There are many kind of robot sensor. I will not describe it here.
In this project, I used 3 range finder sensors to measure the distance between the robot and the object to follow. The name of the sensor is SRF05..

 

2. MICROCONTROLLER ( processor )
Microcontroller act as the brain of the robot. It receives data from sensor, process it and then gives command to the actuator to move. Here I used ATMega128, but it's too expensive for this  project. if you want to build this project, I suggest you to use other cheaper micro controller such as ATMega8, ATMega16, ATMega32 or Arduino Board.

3. ACTUATOR ( output )
Actuator is a mechanism of the robot to change the subject or environment as the result of data process by processor. Because in this project robot only need to move forward, backward, or turn left or right, so I used 4 Geared Motor DC, 12 V with Mosfet Driver motor.

If you want to build the same project, you can use 2 motor with 2 standard wheels and 1 omni wheel as shown below

4. POWER SOURCE
In my robot, I used 2 power sources :  12V LiPo Battery and 7.2V LiPo Battery. I separated the power source between microcontroller and motor driver. here is the scheme :

You can only use 1 power source ( 12 V ) of course, but it is not save if you use high current motor DC because the feedback current from motor will harm the minimum system of the microcontroller.