Optical beam interface for mobile robot control

Today, we are using many types of control pads to control home electronic appliances or sometimes small mobile robots. These control modules are very convenient because we can send various control signals to each appliance. However, when those modules have so many control buttons, we have to learn the usage of them. Moreover, when the number of control modules increases as the number of appliances increase, we have to carefully select the appropriate controller for the appliance we want to control. In this research, we propose an optical beam interface, which can control all home electronic appliances in common. This interface consists of two parts. One is a luminescence part with a laser diode for user side. The other is a light detecting part with some light sensitive elements for electronic appliance side. We focus on a motion control of a home robot especially in this paper by introducing a structure of the proposed interface and the small mobile robot with experimental results.