There are so many projects of building obstacle avoidance robots using Arduinos and Raspberry Pi. I have experience with PIC microcontrollers and know they are low power, easy to program and cheaper than anything else for the amount of on board peripherals. I decided to put together a simple obstacle avoidance robot using a PIC16F1717 microcontroller. It works great and costs far less than using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi. The 4 PWMs and low latency interrupts are at the heart of the robot I call Alpha.
It uses a SN754410NE H-Bridge to drive the two motors. It runs from 4 NiMH batteries which is stepped up through a boost converter giving about 7 v to the motors. The ultrasonic sensor uses a timer on board the PIC to determine distance. The robot "scans" using a nice little interrupt routine. It's a nice project. Just thought too many people use Arduino for stuff like this when using microcontroller without all the 'fluff' is a far more rewarding experienc