BeagleBot

On Coursera i've attended a course on "Control of Mobile Robots". During this course you could build a robot based on the BeagleBone Black and the RedBot from Sparkfun.

The control software was written with Matlab .

Since i had most of the electronic parts, a Pololu chassis and a Tamiya gear box already lying around, i decided to build my own variant of this robot.

On this page i'd like to give you a first visual impression of my robot. Later on i'll add setup instructions and download links for the software.

BeagleBot 1


These two side views show the stacked construction of this cylindrical, differential drive robot:

BeagleBot 3 BeagleBot 2


The top disk contains the BeagleBone Black, a webcam (not needed for the Coursera course) and the power switch:

BeagleBot 4


On the next disk i placed the LiPo battery, the voltage regulator (a LT 1085 CT, 3A, low drop) and a USB hub (which is only needed to provide USB ports for both the WLAN stick and the webcam):

BeagleBot 5


One level below is the sensor disk, containing five Sony IR distance sensors (GP2Y0A41SK0F). Each sensor has a voltage divider attached, to transform the sensor output voltage level to 1.8 V maximum:

BeagleBot 6


The bottom disk is the Pololu chassis which holds the motor H-bridge (L293D) and a Schmitt trigger (74HC14) for conditioning the signals of the two wheel encoders:

BeagleBot 7


Eventually mounted on the other side of the chassis is the motor gear box with two wheel encoders (CNY36 photo interrupter plus 16 sector DIY encoder wheel) attached to it:

BeagleBot 9


Here is a detailed view of one of the wheel encoders:

BeagleBot 10