It doesn’t matter whether you are a designer, a maker, a developer or an amateur who tries to build a simple mobile robot. At some point, you will want to improve the capabilities of your robot to recognize and detect obstacles, navigate by waypoints, and more. In other words, you want to turn your robot into an autonomous robot.

In general terms, an autonomous mobile robot should be capable to navigate in an uncontrolled environment without the need of human guidance. It should act like a remote controlled robot. If you have already built a robot able to navigate autonomously, you should know how hard is to build one of these!

In this article, I explore a variety of DIY projects such as RC toy cars turned into self-driving vehicles, obstacle avoidance robots, autonomous vacuum cleaners, vehicles with autonomous navigation, and more.

Line follower robots

The world’s first Android autonomous vehicle: from this project you can learn how to hack a toy car and develop machine vision algorithm to follow street lines.



Autonomous arduino-car: this is an autonomous bot designed to follow a black line on a white floor.

Pegasus – Mini Smart Vehicle: this vehicle uses the OpenCV library to navigate and recognize images.



Line Follower Robot with Android and Arduino: a simple autonomous robot with an Android device attached to it and able to analyze the environment using the camera.

Navigation

Self-Organising Robots

Robot Navigation by Waypoints