Micromouse Design

 1. Introduction

In this project I designed a simple Arduino based micromouse. First, let me explain what a micromouse is. A micromouse is an autonomous robot which is smaller in size than other hobby robots and in general they are built for robotics competitions. Mainly they are used for maze solving. 

When you are designing a simple micromouse robot, mainly you need two gear motors with encoders, IR sensors for object detection, motor driver, a gyro sensor for making it easy to take sharp turns in the arena, the microcontroller and an optional buzzer and a LCD display. For the motors, I used N20 gear motors with encoders. As the IR sensors, I used infrared emitting diodes and infrared detecting diodes. As the motor driver, I used L293D IC and MPU6050 as the gyroscope and finally, Arduino Nano as the microcontroller.

The following figure shows the hierarchical schematic diagram and there after the IR sensor panel, power supply, motor driver, gyro sensor, and other required connections are shown. The IR sensor panel was designed to give a digital output signal to the microcontroller. Here, I have used a linear 5V regulator, but I recommend you to use a switching converter instead of a linear regulator if it is possible.  

Then, using Altium Designer, I created the PCB layout of the micromouse.

2. Schematic Diagram and PCB Layout 

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