January 21, 2013: My friend Kevin, contacted me for building an advanced autonomous companion robot. The final goal is to make the robot follow you. This is the construction log page, with more content added as the project moves on. As this project continues what I have shown on my blog, in a previous article, you can see this post a a follow-up, named as Part2.

Kevin carefully prepared everything for the long trip, and the package with the hardware components got here today. For the new robot I will drop my previous Ara robotic rover platform, in favor of the neat A4WD1 from Lynxmotion. Essentially this is a similar differential control rover platform, using 4 geared motors of 200RPM 37mm diameter, one for each wheel (HN-GH12-2217).

Putting the rover together was easy except for the tires which required a little Vaseline. The robot's central processing unit will be an Atmega128 microcontroller and not the Lynxmotion's BASIC Atom Pro 28 Pin (which also requires the custom "bot board II"). Atmega128 wins here with its 128KB flash memory, 16MHz max operating frequency and a multitude of IO ports, while the Basic atom pro can only provide 32K of Program Space and a limited operating frequency (Not to mention the costs, Lynxmotion products are also very expensive).
The motors are to be driven via a Sabertooth 2X12 R/C Regenerative Dual Channel Motor Controller . I am yet to see how well this performs when compared to my simple H-Bridge that I used before. The battery is a generous 12V 2800mAh from Lynxmotion.