Request: Robotic lawn mower

[revoltage]

Hi everyone,

I'm planning to build an autonomous lawnmower for my final year dissertation.
Your ideas will be helpful.


Thanks a lot

[zokij]

WOW that was perspective - you really believe yourself ... Its will not be easy step in your career ... You will must learn plentiful of little time. I will try to help but we will see.

Posted on: July 21, 2008, 03:48:54 03:48 - Automerged
I will prepare some mix for your first step (as you req in personal message)....
second step will be my post on forum (read that and download that):
http://www.sonsivri.com/forum/index.php?topic=8914.msg41872#msg41872
and then you can try that project ....

[revoltage]

Ok thanks zokij. I have already downloaded the 5 ebooks. Has just started reading the 1st one

[revoltage]

Apart from the lawn mower... anyone has an idea what final year project involving PIC 16F877A I can do?

Thanks for your response guyz

[30f4011]

1) RC servo based robotic arm
2) MCU based temperature controller
3) data acquisition system (data logger)
4) stepper motor controller
 many more : http://www.sonsivri.com/forum/index.php?board=47.0 

[Parmin]

There is a Radio Electronics magazine article a while ago describing this project (lawn mower).
If I am not wrong it use random cutting path and grass height sensors to search and destroy 

I reckon it is better to find an allogarithm to cut the grass more efficiently than random movements,
plus en-cooperating solar energy for it, than to re invent the wheel.
This falls perfectly within the capability of a 16F877A. 
However, if you have choice, you should try to use PIC18 instead.

Other than that, the idea of using a PIC is to make it to do what you want it to do..
An engineer should look and see what is needed and develop some engenious gadget to fulfil the need.
If you follows other's idea or project, then you are no more than a repair technician or a hack.

Good luck on your project and keep us posted on what you do.

 

[Malcolm]

Hi Parmin,
 If you have this Radio-Electronics magazine article why not post it for us?

Thanks.

[Parmin]

Sorry- I do not have the magazine anymore - its been what.. about 20 years ago? since then Radio Electronics change name to (I think) Electronics Now, and then they change name again to whatever..

.. they were hard copy stuff back then and when I read it, this project were irrelevant to my life.  And when the home Internet connections became reality in the early 1990's I basically thrown out a lot of my hard copy stuff..

But if someone have a stash of these mags, they should be from the late 1980's to early 1990's
- just the same age as a lot of members here.. Daym - I am old!!

[cjeffries1]

Ok i'm gathering all the info i can obtain from the net...anyone knows how to built the perimeter system friendly robotics uses for robomow (schematic)? A wire is place round the loop within which the lawn has to be mown and the robot mows inside this perimeter ...

One thing you could experiment with is making the perimeter wire an inductive, very low power, low frequency transmission. Place an RF pick up coil with an amp and dc rectifier feeding the ADC i/p of the robot uC. The DC voltage into the ADC is proportional to the receiver signal strength. i.e when the robot is withing 3 feet of the perimeter wire the ADC value exceeds a threshold set in the uC that tells the robot it can go no closer towards the wire. Use a high gain FET op-amp for the analog amplification so as not to load the RF receiver and give you a good analog range in which to set the DC level relative to the distance from the wire. Make the antenna pick up perpendicular to the axis of the perimeter wire so that the main signal RF will pick up the shortest perpendicular path from the wire axis to the robot.

[ruitje]

Here some links to interesting projects:

http://www.geocities.com/zs6bne/myrobotlawnmower.htm

http://www.robio.be/grasmaaier/

http://www.electro-tech-online.com/robotics-chat/40801-lawn-mower-robot.html

http://cns.bu.edu/~cjmorlan/robotics/lawnmower/

http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/hb_robotics/article/0,2033,DIY_13886_2832545,00.html


Hopefully something is in it 4U.

[caveman508]

PWM on a PIC is simple when using the hardware, just simply set it up and forget it until a change is needed.  The BASIC compiler should have routines to do it for you.  I have never used Mikrobasic, but it should have a function to do it.  I see that the 877 has two CCP modules, so you don't even have to mess with a software created PWM, just use the two in hardware.

Caveman