Linux robot

During our engineering training, sometimes our teachers give us the task of working in interesting projects, our last work was to program a robot so we could control it with a smartphone. This project was so interesting that we just couldn’t talk about it in this blog.

The robot is already build, it’s a mobile robot that has four wheels, a clamp and many sensors (Infra-red, ultrasounds, gps, compass…). 

Our mission was to program the robot so he can be controlled by an application on a smartphone. The robot has to send all the sensors data and the image of its camera to the smartphone and the pilot can use the phone like a remote to move the bot thanks to wifi. The communication architecture used here is called client-server, it means that the server is passive and waiting for request that the client send. In our case the server is the robot and the client is the smartphone.

The robot is controlled by a raspberry-pi, it’s a nano-computer that has the size of a credit card and that work with the operating system linux. It’s used a lot in engineering to do prototypes in embedded electronics because it’s cheap and easy to use. We did realise our software in using the java language. The smartphone app was realized by another group in html and JavaScript.

At the end we did a contest off glass catching with our bots, it was a big accomplishment for us.