Introduction

    The aim of this mechatronics project is to design and make a robot which follows the following requirements :

- Follows a wire in which an AC current with a certain frequency is flowing (called inductance guidance)
- Stops at the end of the wire
- The different parts of the robot must be designed with 3D drawings
- The circuit must be assembled on a PCB board
- The robot must be realized in practice and should work at the end
- The components have to be chosen by the students and as cheap as possible
- The robot has to be made by a group of students (3 to 5 students)

    The first idea of the robot was to have a robot taking the phone of its user and going to an electrical plug to charge it. To move the robot the solution of wire guidance was thus selected. Since the most impotant part of the project is following the wire, this idea of charging the robot was let as advanced requirements if time was still left to perform it.

    To be able to fullfil those requirements different knowledges are needed :
-Notions in CAO to design the pieces of the robot
-Notions in electronincs to make the chain of acquisition of the sensors values
-Notions of informatic to make a link between the sensors and the actuators
    Remark : for this project in particular the notions of control are not required since the control is done automatically thanks to the wire.
The main idea of the project is thus to find as much informations as possible about the domain of interest and to combine them to fullfil the requirements.
This kind of robot is used in some industrial applications to move materials around a manufactering facility. The AGV’s, Automated Guided Vehicles (See Figure below), are following a wire with a certain frequency current flowing in it. As the robots are only

Figure: Automated Guided Vehicles with inductance guidance in a manufactering facility

following the frequency they are designed for, several wires with different current frequencies can be crossed under the ground and the robots can cross each other without problem. If one robot is too close to another one, there are some infrared sensors (IR transmitter receiver) fixed on it to detect the other robot and he stops.