A Study of Robot Car Positioning System in Small Area Based on Optical Mouse Sensor

Abstract

For robot car, positioning or finding coordinate of robot are important in robot competition. Because which position a robot locates will decide which way it will go or which operation it will perform. How to position accurately becomes a key technology for robot system. Most of the robot positioning systems in competition depends on some special assisted black lines or dots on the competition site. However, in order to enhance the robot design, cancel those assisted lines becomes a new trend. Without those assisted lines, we must develop a new positioning technology to face an environment without any assisted lines. In this paper, we use both Arduino microprocessor and optical mouse sensor to design an optical positioning system for robot. We install an optical mouse sensor in the bottom of robot. When the robot moves, the mouse sensor will return the raw data of movement vector. The middle device Arduino will analyze the movement vector base on previous coordinate and finds the new coordinate of robot. The robot is built by the Lego NXT system and is connected to the Arduino system by I2C interface. In robot, we can build a digitalized map of competition site in advanced. Then it can continuously read the new coordinate from Arduino while moving, and decide which way to go or perform some operation.