How to make a robot at home from available materials. Useful resources for creating a robot with your own hands. Flat material for construction

In the age of innovation, robots are no longer outlandish machines. But you will probably be surprised: Is it really possible to make a robot at home?

Undoubtedly, it is quite difficult to create a robot with a complex design, microelements, circuits and programs. And you can’t do without knowledge of physics, mechanics, electronics and programming. However, the simplest robot can be made with your own hands.

Robot- a machine that should automatically perform any actions. But for a homemade robot there is an easier task - to move.

Let's look at 2 simplest options for creating a robot.

1. Let's make a small bug that will vibrate. We will need:

  • motor from a children's car,
  • lithium battery CR2032 (tablet);
  • battery holder,
  • paper clips,
  • insulating tape,
  • soldering iron,
  • Light-emitting diode.


We wrap the LED with electrical tape, leaving its ends free. Using a soldering iron, solder the end of the LED and back wall battery holder. We solder the other LED wire to the motor contacts. We unbend the paper clips, they will be the legs of the bug. Solder the legs to the motor. The legs can be wrapped with electrical tape, so the robot beetle will be more stable. The battery holder wires must be connected to the motor wires. As soon as the lithium battery is installed in the holder, the beetle will begin to vibrate and move. Watch the video on how to create such a simple robot below.

2. Making a robot artist. We will need:

  • plastic or cardboard,
  • motor from a children's car,
  • lithium battery CR2032,
  • 3 markers,
  • electrical tape, foil,
  • glue.

From plastic or cardboard you need to cut out a shape for the future robot - a three-dimensional triangle. A hole is cut in the center into which the motor is inserted. 3 holes are cut from 3 edges into which markers are inserted. A battery is attached to the motor wire using glue with pieces of foil. The motor is inserted into a hole in the robot's body and secured there with glue or tape. The second motor wire is connected to the battery. And the robot artist begins to move!

I dug up an interesting article about how to make a robot yourself from simple spare parts. The explanations there are not very clear. I left the pictures and corrected the explanations a little.

First, look at the first picture - what you should get after an hour of work. Well, or a little more. In any case, anyone can do it on Sunday.

What we need to assemble such a robot:

  1. Matchbox.
  2. Two wheels with old toy, or two caps from a plastic bottle.
  3. Two motors (preferably the same power and voltage).
  4. Switch.
  5. The front third wheel can be taken from either an old toy or a plastic bottle.
  6. The LED can be taken as desired, since in this model it does not have much significance.
  7. Two galvanic element one and a half volts - two 1.5 V batteries
  8. Insulation tape

Two motors are used because motors always have an axis on one side only. And it’s easier to take two motors than to knock out the axle from the motor and replace it with a longer one so that it comes out from both sides of the motor. Although in principle, this is quite possible. Then the second motor is not needed.

Any switch with two positions: on-off. If you install a more complicated switch, you can make the robot move both forward and backward by switching the polarity of the batteries.

You can do without a switch at all and just twist the wires to make the robot move.

You can take both AA and AAA batteries; they are a little smaller, but also lighter - the robot will move faster, although AAA batteries will run out faster.

It is better to connect the LED through a limiting resistor of 20-50 ohms and make it in the form of a headlight, in front. Or like a beacon - on top of a robot. You can connect two LEDs - they will be like “eyes”.

Instead of electrical tape, you can use adhesive tape - it makes no difference.

How to make a robot - step by step instructions.

We need wheels or, if they are missing, attach covers from the motors to the rods of the motors. plastic bottles. You can do this with glue, or by pressing the head into the hole. You can use a soldering iron - it will hold better.

Plastic bottles are most often made of polyethylene; they cannot be glued with ordinary glue. A glue gun works great.

Let me remind you that it is better to take the same wheels and motors. Otherwise the robot will not drive straight. The motors in the picture are different and it is unlikely that this robot drives in a straight line, most likely in circles.

Now, using adhesive tape, you need to attach one of the motors to the matchbox. The mount should only be half the size of the box, since there will also be a second motor on the other part.

We attach the second motor with the wheel to the other side of the box with electrical tape.

Since our motors are located at the bottom matchbox, then you need to place the batteries on the top, naturally securing everything with adhesive tape. We also add a switch.

Place the heat shrink tubing onto the motor wheel. Cut a piece of tubing to be slightly longer than each wheel, place it on the wheel, and tighten it using a lighter or soldering iron. You can make multiple layers to increase the diameter and create "tires".

Glue the switches to the back of the battery slot. Glue the switches to the back of the battery slot onto a flat surface. This should be the side where the wires stick out. Place them at an angle in the corners so that the contacts furthest from the lever touch the centerline of the device.

The levers should be on the outside, next to the wires.

Place a metal strip. Place a 2.5cm x 7.5cm piece of aluminum behind the switch in the center and bend the excess piece 45 degrees. Glue it using hot glue. Let the glue cool completely before continuing.

Attach the motors to the metal wings. Using hot glue, glue the motors to the bent piece of metal so that the “tires” touch the ground. You should pay attention to the charging marks on the motors, since the “tires” should turn in the opposite direction. Make sure one motor is reversed relative to the other.

Shape the rear wheel. You will need a rear wheel to prevent the robot from dragging its back end along the ground. Take a large paperclip and shape it so you have a TARDIS or house with a medium sized bead on top. Lay it on the side opposite the wires and secure it in place by hot glueing the edges to the sides of the battery socket.

Solder the robot. You will need a soldering iron and soldering iron to connect everything electric wires between robot components. This must be done carefully for it to work. There are several connections you need to make:

  • First solder the connection of both switches.
  • Then solder small wire between the two central connections on the switches.
  • Solder two wires, one from the negative motor and one from the positive motor, for the final switch connection.
  • Solder a longer wire between the remaining motor connections (connecting both motors together).
  • Solder a longer wire between the back connection between the motor and the back of the battery socket where the negative and positive discharge connect.
  • Take the positive wire from the battery socket and solder it to the center, touching the switch connections.
  • The negative wire from the battery jack will go to the center connection on one of the switches.

  • Create the robot's antennas. Cut the rubber/plastic ends off the spare connectors, straighten the two paper clips (until they resemble insect antennae) and connect the spare connectors to the antennas using heat shrink tubing.

    Make a robot very simple Let's figure out what it takes to create a robot at home, in order to understand the basics of robotics.

    Surely, after watching enough movies about robots, you have often wanted to build your own comrade in battle, but you didn’t know where to start. Of course, you won't be able to build a bipedal Terminator, but that's not what we're trying to achieve. Anyone who knows how to hold a soldering iron correctly in their hands can assemble a simple robot and this does not require deep knowledge, although it will not hurt. Amateur robotics is not much different from circuit design, only much more interesting, because it also involves areas such as mechanics and programming. All components are easily available and are not that expensive. So progress does not stand still, and we will use it to our advantage.

    Introduction

    So. What is a robot? In most cases this automatic device, which reacts to any actions environment. Robots can be controlled by humans or perform pre-programmed actions. Typically, the robot is equipped with a variety of sensors (distance, rotation angle, acceleration), video cameras, and manipulators. The electronic part of the robot consists of a microcontroller (MC) - a microcircuit that contains a processor, a clock generator, various peripherals, RAM and permanent memory. There are a huge number of different microcontrollers in the world for different applications, and on their basis you can assemble powerful robots. AVR microcontrollers are widely used for amateur buildings. They are by far the most accessible and on the Internet you can find many examples based on these MKs. To work with microcontrollers, you need to be able to program in assembler or C and have basic knowledge of digital and analog electronics. In our project we will use C. Programming for MK is not much different from programming on a computer, the language syntax is the same, most functions are practically no different, and new ones are quite easy to learn and convenient to use.

    What do we need

    To begin with, our robot will be able to simply avoid obstacles, that is, repeat the normal behavior of most animals in nature. Everything we need to build such a robot can be found in radio stores. Let's decide how our robot will move. I consider the most successful tracks to be those used in tanks; these are the most convenient solution, because the tracks have greater maneuverability than the wheels of the car and are more convenient to control (to turn, it is enough to rotate the tracks in different directions). Therefore, you will need any toy tank whose tracks rotate independently of each other, you can buy one at any toy store at a reasonable price. From this tank you only need a platform with tracks and motors with gearboxes, the rest you can safely unscrew and throw away. We also need a microcontroller, my choice fell on ATmega16 - it has enough ports for connecting sensors and peripherals and in general it is quite convenient. You will also need to purchase some radio components, a soldering iron, and a multimeter.

    Making a board with MK

    In our case, the microcontroller will perform the functions of the brain, but we will not start with it, but with powering the robot’s brain. Proper nutrition- a guarantee of health, so we will start with how to properly feed our robot, because this is where novice robot builders usually make mistakes. And in order for our robot to work normally, we need to use a voltage stabilizer. I prefer the L7805 chip - it is designed to produce a stable 5V output voltage, which is what our microcontroller needs. But due to the fact that the voltage drop on this microcircuit is about 2.5V, a minimum of 7.5V must be supplied to it. Together with this stabilizer, electrolytic capacitors are used to smooth out voltage ripples and a diode is necessarily included in the circuit to protect against polarity reversal.

    Now we can move on to our microcontroller. The case of the MK is DIP (it’s more convenient to solder) and has forty pins. On board there is an ADC, PWM, USART and much more that we will not use for now. Let's look at a few important nodes. The RESET pin (9th leg of the MK) is pulled up by resistor R1 to the “plus” of the power source - this must be done! Otherwise, your MK may unintentionally reset or, more simply put, glitch. Also a desirable measure, but not mandatory, is to connect RESET through the ceramic capacitor C1 to ground. In the diagram you can also see a 1000 uF electrolyte; it saves you from voltage dips when the engines are running, which will also have a beneficial effect on the operation of the microcontroller. Quartz resonator X1 and capacitors C2, C3 should be located as close as possible to pins XTAL1 and XTAL2.

    I won’t talk about how to flash MK, since you can read about it on the Internet. We will write the program in C; I chose CodeVisionAVR as the programming environment. This is a fairly user-friendly environment and is useful for beginners because it has a built-in code creation wizard.

    Motor control

    An equally important component in our robot is the motor driver, which makes it easier for us to control it. Never and under no circumstances should motors be connected directly to the MK! In general, powerful loads cannot be controlled directly from the microcontroller, otherwise it will burn out. Use key transistors. For our case, there is a special chip - L293D. In such simple projects, always try to use this particular chip with the “D” index, as it has built-in diodes for overload protection. This microcircuit is very easy to control and is easy to get in radio stores. It is available in two packages: DIP and SOIC. We will use DIP in the package due to the ease of mounting on the board. L293D has separate power supply for motors and logic. Therefore, we will power the microcircuit itself from the stabilizer (VSS input), and the motors directly from the batteries (VS input). L293D can withstand a load of 600 mA per channel, and it has two of these channels, that is, two motors can be connected to one chip. But to be on the safe side, we will combine the channels, and then we will need one micra for each engine. It follows that the L293D will be able to withstand 1.2 A. To achieve this, you need to combine the micra legs, as shown in the diagram. The microcircuit works as follows: when a logical “0” is applied to IN1 and IN2, and a logical one is applied to IN3 and IN4, the motor rotates in one direction, and if the signals are inverted - a logical zero is applied, then the motor will begin to rotate in the other direction. Pins EN1 and EN2 are responsible for turning on each channel. We connect them and connect them to the “plus” of the power supply from the stabilizer. Since the microcircuit heats up during operation, and installing radiators on this type of case is problematic, heat dissipation is provided by GND legs - it is better to solder them on a wide contact pad. That's all you need to know about engine drivers for the first time.

    Obstacle sensors

    So that our robot can navigate and not crash into everything, we will install two infrared sensors on it. The simplest sensor consists of an IR diode that emits in the infrared spectrum and a phototransistor that will receive the signal from the IR diode. The principle is this: when there is no obstacle in front of the sensor, the IR rays do not hit the phototransistor and it does not open. If there is an obstacle in front of the sensor, then the rays are reflected from it and hit the transistor - it opens and current begins to flow. The disadvantage of such sensors is that they can react differently to various surfaces and are not protected from interference - the sensor may accidentally trigger from extraneous signals from other devices. Modulating the signal can protect you from interference, but we won’t bother with that for now. For starters, that's enough.


    Robot firmware

    To bring the robot to life, you need to write firmware for it, that is, a program that would take readings from sensors and control the motors. My program is the simplest, it does not contain complex structures and everyone will understand. The next two lines include header files for our microcontroller and commands for generating delays:

    #include
    #include

    The following lines are conditional because the PORTC values ​​depend on how you connected the motor driver to your microcontroller:

    PORTC.0 = 1; PORTC.1 = 0; PORTC.2 = 1; PORTC.3 = 0; The value 0xFF means that the output will be log. "1", and 0x00 is log. "0". With the following construction we check whether there is an obstacle in front of the robot and on which side it is: if (!(PINB & (1<

    If light from an IR diode hits the phototransistor, then a log is installed on the microcontroller leg. “0” and the robot starts moving backward to move away from the obstacle, then turns around so as not to collide with the obstacle again and then moves forward again. Since we have two sensors, we check for the presence of an obstacle twice - on the right and on the left, and therefore we can find out which side the obstacle is on. The command "delay_ms(1000)" indicates that one second will pass before the next command begins to execute.

    Conclusion

    I've covered most of the aspects that will help you build your first robot. But robotics doesn't end there. If you assemble this robot, you will have a lot of opportunities to expand it. You can improve the robot's algorithm, such as what to do if the obstacle is not on some side, but right in front of the robot. It also wouldn’t hurt to install an encoder - a simple device that will help you accurately position and know the location of your robot in space. For clarity, it is possible to install a color or monochrome display that can show useful information - battery charge level, distance to obstacles, various debugging information. It wouldn't hurt to improve the sensors - installing TSOPs (these are IR receivers that perceive a signal only of a certain frequency) instead of conventional phototransistors. In addition to infrared sensors, there are ultrasonic sensors, which are more expensive and also have their drawbacks, but have recently been gaining popularity among robot builders. In order for the robot to respond to sound, it would be a good idea to install microphones with an amplifier. But what I think is really interesting is installing the camera and programming machine vision based on it. There is a set of special OpenCV libraries with which you can program facial recognition, movement according to colored beacons and many other interesting things. It all depends only on your imagination and skills.

    List of components:

      ATmega16 in DIP-40 package>

      L7805 in TO-220 package

      L293D in DIP-16 housing x2 pcs.

      resistors with a power of 0.25 W with ratings: 10 kOhm x 1 pc., 220 Ohm x 4 pcs.

      ceramic capacitors: 0.1 µF, 1 µF, 22 pF

      electrolytic capacitors: 1000 µF x 16 V, 220 µF x 16 V x 2 pcs.

      diode 1N4001 or 1N4004

      16 MHz quartz resonator

      IR diodes: any two of them will do.

      phototransistors, also any, but responding only to the wavelength of infrared rays

    Firmware code:

    /************************************************ **** Firmware for the robot MK type: ATmega16 Clock frequency: 16.000000 MHz If your quartz frequency is different, then this must be specified in the environment settings: Project -> Configure -> "C Compiler" Tab ****** ***********************************************/ #include #include void main(void) ( //Configure the input ports //Through these ports we receive signals from sensors DDRB=0x00; //Turn on the pull-up resistors PORTB=0xFF; //Configure the output ports //Through these ports we control DDRC motors =0xFF; //Main loop of the program. Here we read the values ​​from the sensors //and control the motors while (1) ( //Move forward PORTC.0 = 1; PORTC.1 = 0; PORTC.2 = 1; PORTC.3 = 0; if (!(PINB & (1<About my robot

    At the moment my robot is almost complete.


    It is equipped with a wireless camera, a distance sensor (both the camera and this sensor are installed on a rotating tower), an obstacle sensor, an encoder, a signal receiver from the remote control and an RS-232 interface for connecting to a computer. It operates in two modes: autonomous and manual (receives control signals from the remote control), the camera can also be turned on/off remotely or by the robot itself to save battery power. I am writing firmware for apartment security (transferring images to a computer, detecting movements, walking around the premises).

    To create your own robot, you don’t have to graduate or read a ton. Just use the step-by-step instructions that robotics masters offer on their websites. You can find a lot of useful information on the Internet on the development of autonomous robotic systems.

    10 Resources for the Aspiring Roboticist

    The information on the site allows you to independently create a robot with complex behavior. Here you can find program examples, diagrams, reference materials, ready-made examples, articles and photographs.

    There is a separate section on the site dedicated to beginners. The creators of the resource place considerable emphasis on microcontrollers, the development of universal boards for robotics, and soldering of microcircuits. Here you can also find source codes for programs and many articles with practical advice.

    The website has a special course “Step by Step”, which describes in detail the process of creating the simplest BEAM robots, as well as automated systems based on AVR microcontrollers.

    A site where aspiring robot creators can find all the necessary theoretical and practical information. A large number of useful topical articles are also posted here, news is updated and you can ask questions to experienced roboticists on the forum.

    This resource is dedicated to a gradual immersion into the world of robot creation. It all starts with knowledge of Arduino, after which the novice developer is told about AVR microcontrollers and more modern ARM analogues. Detailed descriptions and diagrams explain very clearly how and what to do.

    A site about how to make a BEAM robot with your own hands. There is a whole section dedicated to the basics, and there are also logic diagrams, examples, etc.

    This resource very clearly describes how to create a robot yourself, where to start, what you need to know, where to look for information and the necessary parts. The service also contains a section with a blog, forum and news.

    A huge live forum dedicated to the creation of robots. Topics are open here for beginners, interesting projects and ideas are discussed, microcontrollers, ready-made modules, electronics and mechanics are described. And most importantly, you can ask any question about robotics and receive a detailed answer from professionals.

    The amateur roboticist’s resource is primarily dedicated to his own project “Homemade Robot”. However, here you can find a lot of useful topical articles, links to interesting sites, learn about the author’s achievements and discuss various design solutions.

    The Arduino hardware platform is the most convenient for developing robotic systems. The information on the site allows you to quickly understand this environment, master the programming language and create several simple projects.