Design and Development of an Unmanned Ground Vehicle with Serial Manipulator and its Control Mechanism

Abstract

The use of robotic vehicles for doing various jobs has been significantly increases in the last decade. Industries as well as militaries around the world, use them to perform their day to day operations. In this paper, a computationally efficient, cost-effective and user-friendly Arduino based, control methodology is presented to control an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and its serial manipulator. A transmitter made up of a gamepad, WiFi module, and Arduino as a main controller is used to send commands. These commands reside on a cloud server from where the receiver picks them up and activates its various peripherals to fulfill them. The designed control mechanism is implemented on a fabricated UGV for real-time performance evaluation. Field tests indicate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.