My First robot with Arduino

This is my first robot with Arduino Mega boards. The body of the robot is made with the components of RobotDesigner kit (Japan Robotech Ltd.) This includes wheels (motors), IR sensors and the body. Here we use an array of 6 IR sensors to avoid obstacles on its path. Arduino MEGA provides 16 Analog input pins and 13 PWM outputs which can be used to drive motors. We use Toshiba TA7291AP full-bridge driver to drive the dc motors. It can give an output current of 1A and can provide forward and reverse rotations. We use two battery supply for this robot. One for powering the Arduino board and the other one for driving the motors.
The one thing I must mention here is that I could assemble and program the entire thing only because of the help that I received from my labmate Mr. Asuki Kohno, who is a final year under-graduate student in our lab. He is very good at these things.

I recently modified the design. The new one makes use of a caterpillar track that enables it to move over things like wires, cotton, threads and other soft  objects lying on the ground. Putting caterpillar track on to the robot took some time. Its because we are not using an off-the-shelf caterpillar module. That would have saved our time, but these are not readily available. I mean you need to order from abroad. We could get hold of "Tamiya Track kit" to build our own caterpillar system. It costs only $10 to get one such kit. But one has to align the wheels and mount them on his robot properly so that the track does not slip over the wheel etc. A better one with its own frame to house caterpillar track may cost little higher. For instance, RP5 track chassis costs around $50.