Controlling your robot with a hobby remote control

Hobby RCs have been in use for decades. Even though the underlying radio technology has changed a lot and modern hobby radio controls offer many advanced features compared to the early days of RC technology, the output signal produced by the receiver has remained remarkably simple. This makes them extremely easy to integrate into an Arduino robot.

A hobby RC system consists of a handheld transmitter with control inputs such as sticks, wheels, or buttons, and a receiver. Each manual input to the transmitter is transmitted wirelessly to the receiver and output by the receiver as a digital signal. Between 2 and 10 signals are common among standard systems. The different signals that can be transmitted are called channels. With a six-channel RC system, we can control six functions of our robot, for example, six joints of a robot arm.

Decoding the receiver output

While an RC transmitter can take on many forms, shapes, and sizes...