Making an Affordable Educational Guide Robot: EGR1

Abstract

This paper describes the course of creating an affordable in-door Educational Guide Robot platform using recycled electronic and metal parts. An Arduino Uno and Mega were tested with a HC-06 Bluetooth module, and HC-SR04 Ultrasonic sensors. We explore and discuss the effectiveness of the widely used and low cost HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors, and the Minoru webcam on an Arduino platform using open source software. We built a Bluetooth communication model with an Arduino Mega board and a Nexus 7 tablet that runs Android operating system. Our goals are to create an affordable educational robot platform for AI applications, to provide a quick and easy way to understand electronic communications between Arduino and Android tablet, to explore Android vision system and use it to guide the robot navigation. In the future, we will add position recognition feature to our Android application based on an image of a building blue print and guide visitors to any office, lab, and classroom in any building based on that particular building print.