Conventionally, wireless-controlled robots use RF circuits, which have the drawbacks of limited working range, limited frequency range and limited control. Use of a mobile phone for robotic control can overcome these limitations. It provides the advantages of robust control, working range as large as the coverage area of the service provider,no interference with other controllers and up to twelve controls.
Although the appearance and capabilities of robots vary vastly, all robots share the features of a mechanical, movable structure under some form of control. The control of robot involves three distinct phases: perception, processing and action. Generally, the preceptors are sensors mounted on the robot, processing is done by the on-board microcontroller or processor, and the task (action) is performed using motors or with some other actuators.
Project overview:
In this project, the robot is controlled by a mobile phone that makes a call to the mobile phone attached to the robot. In the course of a call, if any button is pressed, a tone corresponding to the button pressed is heard at the other end of the call. This tone is called ‘dual-tone multiple-frequency’ (DTMF) tone. The robot perceives this DTMF tone with the help of the phone stacked in the robot.
The received tone is processed by the ATmega16 microcontroller with the help of DTMF decoder MT8870. The decoder decodes the DTMF tone into its equivalent binary digit and this binary number is sent to the microcontroller. The microcontroller is preprogrammed to take a decision for any given input and outputs its decision to motor drivers in order to drive the motors for forward or backward motion or a turn.
The mobile that makes a call to the mobile phone stacked in the robot acts as a remote. So this simple robotic project does not require the construction of receiver and transmitter units.
DTMF signaling is used for telephone signaling over the line in the voice- frequency band to the call switching center. The version of DTMF used for telephone tone dialing is known as ‘Touch-Tone.’
DTMF assigns a specific frequency (consisting of two separate tones) to each key so that it can easily be identified by the electronic circuit. The signal generated by the DTMF encoder is a direct algebraic summation, in real time, of the amplitudes of two sine (cosine) waves of different frequencies, i.e., pressing ‘5’ will send a tone made by adding 1336 Hz and 770 Hz to the other end of the line. The tones and assignments in a DTMF system are shown in Table I.
Circuit description:
Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of the microcontroller-based mobile phone operated land rover. The important components of this rover are a DTMF decoder, microcontroller and motor driver.
Click to enlarge
Component Required:
IC1 - MT8870 DTMF decoder
IC2 - ATmega16 AVR microcontroller
IC3 - L293D motor driver
IC4 - 74LS04 NOT gate
D1 - 1N4007 rectifier diode
R1, R2 - 100-kilo-ohm
R3 - 330-kilo-ohm
R4-R8 - 10-kilo-ohm
C1 - 0.47μF ceramic disk
C2, C3, C5, C6 - 22pF ceramic disk
C4 - 0.1μF ceramic disk
XTAL1 - 3.57MHz crystal
XTAL2 - 12MHz crystal
S1 - Push-to-on switch
M1, M2 - 6V, 50-rpm geared DC motor
Batt. - 6V, 4.5Ah battery
An MT8870 series DTMF decoder is used here. All types of the MT8870 series use digital counting techniques to detect and decode all the 16 DTMF tone pairs into a 4-bit code output. The built-in dial tone rejection circuit eliminates the need for pre-filtering. When the input signal given at pin 2 (IN-) in single-ended input configuration is recognized to be effective, the correct 4-bit decode signal of the DTMF tone is transferred to Q1 (pin 11) through Q4 (pin 14) outputs.
Table II shows the DTMF data output table of MT8870. Q1 through Q4 outputs of the DTMF decoder (IC1) are connected to port pins PA0 through PA3 of ATmega16 microcontroller (IC2) after inversion by N1 through N4, respectively.
The ATmega16 is a low-power, 8-bit, CMOS microcontroller based on the AVR enhanced RISC architecture. It provides the following features: 16 kB of in-system programmable Flash program memory with read-while-write capabilities, 512 bytes of EEPROM, 1kB SRAM, 32 general-purpose input/output (I/O) lines and 32 general-purpose working registers. All the 32 registers are directly connected to the arithmetic logic unit, allowing two independent registers to be accessed in one single instruction executed in one clock cycle. The resulting architecture is more code-efficient.
Outputs from port pins PD0 through PD3 and PD7 of the microcontroller are fed to inputs IN1 through IN4 and enable pins (EN1 and EN2) of motor driver L293D, respectively, to drive two geared DC motors. Switch S1 is used for manual reset. The microcontroller output is not sufficient to drive the DC motors, so current drivers are required for motor rotation.
The L293D is a quad, high-current, half-H driver designed to provide bidirectional drive currents of up to 600 mA at voltages from 4.5V to 36V. It makes it easier to drive the DC motors. The L293D consists of four drivers. Pins IN1 through IN4 and OUT1 through OUT4 are input and output pins, respectively, of driver 1 through driver 4. Drivers 1 and 2, and drivers 3 and 4 are enabled by enable pin 1 (EN1) and pin 9 (EN2), respectively. When enable input EN1 (pin 1) is high, drivers 1 and 2 are enabled and the outputs corresponding to their inputs are active. Similarly, enable input EN2 (pin 9) enables drivers 3 and 4.
In the following part of the description we will consider the software for the microcontroller a design of model, a command and management of model of the car by means of phone.
