DTMF technology applied to the identification and control of a small mobile robot

An element to emphasize in student learning is the use of a motivational strategy that it is able to generate the intention to learn. The incorporation of active and collaborative methodologies in engineering classes such as: Problem and Project based Learning (PBL) and Challenge Problem (CP) have allowed that the student should reach a much more significant learning, at the same time that it assumes the responsibility of his own learning. This fact allows to the students to acquire knowledge and to put in practical numerous theoretical bases of an entertaining and fun form. The use of these educational strategies helps in turn to the evaluation of skills, abilities, knowledge and competences acquired during the learning process, being confirmed easily of experimental form. To control electronic devices of a local or remote way always has supposed an example of additional motivation on the students. In this document there appears the use of this type of devices as educational resource. The tone dialing system has been and is widely used by the digital telephony as method of communication between terminals and computers. Thus there have been developed different applications based on a system of dialing DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency) tones used in the standard telephone system. So there have been implemented several circuits constituted by the MT8870 as a tones decoder module and iC PIC16F876 as manager of the control and signal processing. A mobile telephone recycling NOKIA 3310 has been used to transmit the different frequencies to the control circuit and a small autonomous robot is controlled by the DTMF tones generated by the system via a GSM network.