40 Autonomous Mobile Robots on Wheels That You Can Build at Home

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

• How I built a neural network controlled self-driving (RC) car!: this self-driving car is built with artificial intelligence and an Android phone attached to the platform.
  
• Daddy’s Robot Car: DRC Mark 1: the Raspberry Pi and a camera make this robot to navigate around a room.
  
• JetsonBot: this is an autonomous robot engineered to follow something using computer vision algorithm.
  
• A Mobile Robot with Vision Based Obstacle Avoidance: this mobile robot is capable of detection and avoids obstacles using a computer vision algorithm and a Raspberry Pi board.
  
• Autonomous car – obstacle avoidance with ultrasonic sensor
  
• Vision Guided Robot- Video Processing with BeagleBone Black and OpenCV C++: a wheeled robot with a robot arm attached and a design that allows the platform to navigate through obstacles.
  
• Basic Obstacles Avoidance with an Arduino Robot
  
• Compact – a Small Arduino Robot: a simple 2WD robot engineered to navigate through obstacles using an infrared sensor.
  
• Autonomous obstacle avoiding car: this is how to build an autonomous car without writing a line of code. How? With Embrio, a new visual programming environment.
  
• ArduBot: a simple 2WD mobile robot with a printed body and a platform engineered to avoid obstacles and choose the best way to drive.
  
• Multipurpose Bot: with an Arduino Mega 2560, you can build this autonomous 2WD robot with three infrared Switches.
  
• Autonomous Arduino Car with Infrared Proximity Sensor: a simple remote controlled toy car hacked into an autonomous bot with an Arduino and an infrared proximity sensor.
  
• Simple Lego mindstorms autonomous drone: if you have a Lego Mindstorms kit at home, you can have a lot of fun building different things. This autonomous bot can drive itself using an ultrasonic sensor.
  
• First Robot: a simple mobile robot engineered to navigate around the environment using an infrared sensor.
  
• Autonomous Lynxmotion Rover
  
• Arduino Obstacle-Avoiding Bot from OddWires
  
• Autonomous vehicles: this is a toy car transformed into an autonomous robot able to navigate around using an infrared sensor.
  
• Autonomous obstacle avoider: in this tutorial, GIPCY DANGER shows us how to build a printed robot able to navigate autonomously and avoid obstacles.
  
• Robot Vacuum Cleaner: this Arduino UNO cleaning robot is engineered to move around your room and clean it.
  
• J-BOT OFFICE ROBOT
  
• Arduino Autonomous Upgrade Module for MINDS-i 4×4 Robot 3-in-1 Kit
  
• 4tronix Agobo review – a cheap, hackable robotics kit for the Raspberry Pi board.
  
• 2D SLAM and Autonomous Path Planning: an autonomous obstacle avoidance mobile robot based on the Hokuyo UTM30-LX 2D laser scanner as input sensor and controlled by the UDOO board.
  
• Autonomous Autonavigation Robot (Arduino): with two ultrasonic sensors attached to the platform, this wheeled platform is programmed to avoid obstacles and navigate freely in the environment.
  

Self-Organising Robots

• FPGA-powered Autonomous Search and Rescue Vehicles
  
• Swarm Bots: Assembly and Co-operative Transport
  
• Autonomous bottle recycling robot: this 4WD bot is designed to find and collect bottles to recycle them.
  

Robot Navigation by Waypoints

• Arduino Powered Autonomous Vehicle: this is a DIY wheeled robot designed to navigate autonomously through a series of waypoints.
  
• Autonomous Driving with LEGO Mindstorms: give it a map, the start location and the goal location, and this LEGO robot will drive autonomously.
  
• GPS guided autonomous robot: this GPS controlled autonomous vehicle combine GPS data with ultrasonic measurements to navigate and detect obstacles.
  
• GPS Guided Autonomous Rover: this rover is designed to follow a predetermined track using GPS coordinates.
  
• APM 2.5 Ardurover GPS Guided Robot: a robot built from scratch and programmed to perform autonomous navigation with pre-programmed waypoints.
  
• Autonomous Car Build: an autonomous rover for outdoor navigation with xBee, GPS module, accelerometer and gyroscope sensors.
  
• Mini GPS Autonomous Car for Under $100: for no more than $100, you can build an autonomous rover able to navigate by waypoints.
  
• Intel Galileo: Autonomous Navigation Rover with JavaScript: a 4WD LEGO rover controlled by an Intel Galileo board and designed to navigate around the environment by detecting and avoiding obstacles.
  
• Hacked RC car hacked to navigate toward waypoints: this is a complex project for an all-terrain autonomous vehicle guided around the environment via GPS data.