The Arduino Robot is the first official Arduino on wheels. The robot has two processors, one on each of its two boards. The Motor Board controls the motors, and the Control Board reads sensors and decides how to operate. Each of the boards is a full Arduino board programmable using the Arduino IDE.
Both Motor and Control boards are microcontroller boards based on the ATmega32u4 . The Robot has many of its pins mapped to on-board sensors and actuators.
Programming the robot is similar to the process with the Arduino Leonardo. Both processors have built-in USB communication, eliminating the need for a secondary processor. This allows the Robot to appear to a connected computer as a virtual (CDC) serial / COM port.
As always with Arduino, every element of the platform – hardware, software and documentation – is freely available and open-source. This means you can learn exactly how it's made and use its design as the starting point for your own robots. The Arduino Robot is the result of the collective effort from an international team looking at how science can be made fun to learn. Arduino is now on wheels, come ride with us!
Control Board Summary
- Microcontroller ATmega32u4
- Operating Voltage 5V
- Input Voltage 5V through flat cable
- Digital I/O Pins 5
- PWM Channels 6
- Analog Input Channels 4 (of the Digital I/O pins)
- Analog Input Channels (multiplexed) 8
- DC Current per I/O Pin 40 mA
- Flash Memory 32 KB (ATmega32u4) of which 4 KB used by bootloader
- SRAM 2.5 KB (ATmega32u4)
- EEPROM (internal) 1 KB (ATmega32u4)
- EEPROM (external) 512 Kbit (I2C)
- Clock Speed 16 MHz
- Keypad 5 keys
- Knob potentiomenter attached to analog pin
- Full color LCD over SPI communication
- SD card reader for FAT16 formatted cards
- Speaker 8 Ohm
- Digital Compass provides deviation from the geographical north in degrees
- I2C soldering ports 3
- Prototyping areas 4
Motor Board Summary
- Microcontroller ATmega32u4
- Operating Voltage 5V
- Input Voltage 9V to battery charger
- AA battery slot 4 alkaline or NiMh rechargeable batteries
- Digital I/O Pins 4
- PWM Channels 1
- Analog Input Channles 4 (same as the Digital I/O pins)
- DC Current per I/O Pin 40 mA
- DC-DC converter generates 5V to power up the whole robot
- Flash Memory 32 KB (ATmega32u4) of which 4 KB used by bootloader
- SRAM 2.5 KB (ATmega32u4)
- EEPROM 1 KB (ATmega32u4)
- Clock Speed 16 MHz
- Trimmer for movement calibration
- IR line following sensors 5
- I2C soldering ports 1
- Prototyping areas 2