Robot communications circuits/devices?

[louarnold]

I plan on building a small robot as a hobby. There will be a desktop computer to direct it and at least one microprocessor on the robot itself to perform a number of tasks - certainly movement, the proximity sensing , etc. Its not clear how many sensors will be managed on board the robot and how much will be sent back to the desktop for processing. Video will be sent via a wireless webcam.

To start, I want to make sure that there is a simple and reliable solution to the wireless communications between the robot and the desktop, and in the future between robots. What is available - any suggestions?

 

[TonyM]

Never used these myself, but have a look at the Micrel QuikRadio and RadioWire devices:

**broken link removed**

The transmitters/receivers I looked at a while back just converted between logic bits and radio signals. So with those you'd have to implement your own simple protocol. I dunno if there's others that do that sort of thing for you, have a read.

Maybe careless use of them runs the risk of setting off people's front doorbells and baby monitors You can probably find more devising a protocol to avoid that on the internet.

Hope this helps...

 

[louarnold]

I looked at the Micrel chips. I don't want to build from too small a level. I was hoping for a block that would implement the protocol. As for the interface to the rest of the robot, I frankly don't know what exists. This will be my first robot.

Having said this. Those radio chips are really quite remarkable. I'm surprised they exist.

Here is something similar to what I was thinking about: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ja275/nasa/nasa final report.pdf