Android Application Design with MIT App Inventor for Bluetooth Based Mobile Robot Control

In this study, a Bluetooth-based Android application interface is developed to perform a manual and automatic control of a four-wheel-driven mobile robot designed for education, research, health, military, and many other fields. The proposed application with MIT App Inventor consists of three components: the main screen, the manual control screen, and the automatic control screen. The main screen is where the actions of the control preference selection such as manual control and automatic control and the Bluetooth connection between the mobile robot and Android phone occur. When the robot is operated manually for calibration or manual positioning purposes, the manual control screen is employed to adjust the desired robot movement and speed by hand. In the case of the need for automatic motion control, the desired robot position and speed data are inserted into the mobile robot processor through the automatic control screen. At the first stage of the work, the proposed Android application is developed with the design and block editors of the MIT App Inventor. The compiled application is then installed on the Android phone. Next, the communication between the Arduino microcontroller used for the robot control with the Bluetooth protocol and the Android application is established. The accuracy of the data dispatched to the Arduino is tested on the serial connection screen. It is validated that the data from the Android application is transferred to Arduino smoothly. At the end of this study, the manual and automatic controls of the proposed mobile robot are performed experimentally and success of the coordination between the Android application and the mobile robot are demonstrated.