Arduino Robot

I played a bit with Arduino some time ago and I think it is a great idea to get started with MCUs.
I believe it can support you even when you try to do more complicated stuff, but I stopped playing with it for a while since I preferred to get into a more " hardcore " scenario with MCUs.

That said, a couple of years ago, I gifted an Arduino Uno to a young kid (he is the 11yo son of my cousin) who got totally hooked on this thing.

So, to help him advance, now, I proposed to do a sort of Arduino Bootcamp this summer and to build some kind of robot rover together, in about 1 week.

For this reason I am preparing some material and thought that maybe I could document here my experiments so they could be useful to others.
It will be basic stuff, but still enjoyable I guess, to be fair I am not yet sure what the end result will be as I will try to adapt to things he can understand.

The inspiration is the Curiosity Rover that is strolling on Mars... I believe (I am pretty sure actually :) ) we will do something a bit simpler than that, but the idea is to have a rover that can be autonomous (avoiding obstacles, computing directions, speeds etc) and that can receive high level orders via a digital radio connected to a PC on which we will run probably a java client (that I will write).

I guess we will have another arduino as a bridge for the digital radio to the pc.

The rover is based on a 2WD chassis that can be easily found on ebay.

 Rotary encoders will allow us to measure the speed of the robot and calculate its position by integration.
We are planning to use a digital compass to identify the heading, ultrasound modules (most likely 3 of them) to detect obstacles and to scan the area (one of them is going to be mounted on a stepping motor).

I also have some IR emitter/detectors that eventually can be used to implement a "follow the path" functionality, not sure we will be able to stick that one in in time, but maybe we will just add the hardware and later on we will enable the functionality via software.

I am assuming we will use 3 arduinos for the rover itself as we need a lot of i/o (maybe a mega would be enough tho) and this is an option for me to illustrate some serial protocol concepts (we will use uart/spi and I2C, I am leaning towards I2C to allow the communications between the 3 mcus).

If all this sounds interesting to you, then stay tuned, I will document my experiments and tests while I get ready to explain those concepts and ideas to my young colleague!
Plus, hopefully, I will document the construction and tests of the robot which should happen this summer (in a week).

If you have ideas or suggestions, send them in before this summer!

Meanwhile I will probably put on hold my other experiments (I already have a second part on NRF24L01 ready, but not publishing yet until I finish the full series) and focus on this Arduino project.
I simply don' t have enough time for both, sorry.