Experimenting on inexpensive educational robots
Arcbotics' sparki is a very good robots for beginners who are interested in programing/software aspect of robotics than electronic details. During the Independent study we tried many problems in robotics such as calibration, drawing shapes, light following, edge avoidance, random walk with obstacle avoidance, navigation, navigation with obstacle avoidance, bluetooth communication and mapping.
Sparki uses C++ as coding language and has more sensors and features, which are detailed as follows. Sparki has GUI based IDE and SparkiDuino is C++ based IDE.
- Geared stepper motors
- Ultrasonic distance (ping) sensor with Servo
- Graphic LCD
- Port for Bluetooth Serial Module
Following things were implemented on
- Calibration
- Drawing Shapes
- Light following
- Edge Avoidance
- Random walk with obstacle avoidance
- Navigation
- Navigation with obstacle avoidance (Safe Navigation)
- Bluetooth library
- Mapping