An Autonomous Mobile Robot System for Advanced Microcontroller Education

This paper introduces an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) system to enhance students´ project planning, designing, and implementing capabilities while taking the advanced microcontroller course. The AMR system includes three parts of interface circuitries: the main I/O controls, parallel I/O extensions, and serial I/O extensions. In the circuitries of the main I/O controls, an AT89S51 single chip is used as the major controller to trigger LEDs, switches, voice, and RS232 controls; the interface circuitries of the parallel I/O extensions consist of LCM display, keyboard, and optical sensors; as for the serial I/O extensions, 7-segment display, A/D converter, DC motors´ drivers, and memory controls are included. According to the students´ feedbacks, introducing the ARM system in the advanced microcontroller course can attract more students interesting in designing the microcontroller-based applications and influence them in preparation for the senior laboratory project.