Interfacing Actuators and Sensors to the Robot Controller

In the previous chapter, we discussed the selection of the hardware components needed to build our robot. The important components in a robot are actuators and sensors. Actuators provide mobility to the robot and sensors provide information about the robot environment. In this chapter, we will concentrate on the different types of actuators and sensors that we are going to use in this robot and how they can be interfaced with Tiva C LaunchPad, which is a 32 bit ARM micro controller board from Texas Instruments, working at 80 MHz. We will start by discussing actuators. The actuator that we are going to discuss first is a DC-geared motor with an encoder. A DC-geared motor works using direct current and has gear reduction to reduce the shaft speed and increase the torque of the final shaft. These kinds of motors are very economical...