Data Communication in Mobile Robot Application with IC Bus

Problem statement: When connecting multiple devices to a microcontroller, the address and data lines of each device were conventionally connected individually. This required more components to connect everything together and resulted in a lot of traces on the Print Circuit Board (PCB), and also made our systems susceptible to interference and noise. Approach: To solve this problem, Philips developed a communication of Inter-Integrated Circuit System or shortly IC bus. The IC bus is designed with low-bandwidth and short distance protocol. The communication between mobile robots based on PC-Card and sensors by using IC system will be mainly described in this paper. The mobile robot components, IC bus system and IC devices are also introduced. The software is developed to control devices from the robot (master device) to slave devices based on the IC bus with C. Finally, the performance of the IC bus system is compared with previous system by experiment. Result: In term of accuracy of sensor readings from environment by using IC bus and standard microcontroller with interface circuit is compared. The robot is tested by experiment with optimal algorithm in square path both clockwise and counter clockwise. The IC bus system improved accuracy of robot’s orientation more 50% compared with previous system. Conclusion: The proposed system performed effectively and better results than previous ones.