<title>Autonomous mobile platform</title>

Abstract

This paper presents the design and development of a partially intelligent mobile platform. The mobile robot derives its intelligence from sensors such as ultrasonic range finders, a mouse and a set of microswitches. Motion is assumed to bee on a plane two dimensional surface. The platform consists of two front wheels and two rear wheels. While the front wheels are undriven, the rear wheels are individually driven by two motors to realize both forward movement as well as steering. Ultrasonic range finders have been employed to plan an obstacle free path. A mouse like arrangement is fitted in the platform's underside, with the mouse ball in contact with the surface of travel, to help the host to keep track of the platform's current position. A single chip microcontroller based card has been designed for communication between the platform and the host IBM PC. This is part of the work carried out at the department of Electronics, S.J. College of Engineering, Mysore, India.