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Course Lesson 9 of 10: Obstacle Avoidance using Raspberry Pi Pico 4WD Smart Car

Welcome to Lesson 9 of the Raspberry Pi Pico Smart Car course by Robojax. This lesson is part of the 10-part educational series built around the SunFounder Raspberry Pi Pico 4-Wheel Drive Smart Car Kit.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to combine multiple components—servo motor, ultrasonic sensor, and motor control—to enable your smart car to detect and avoid obstacles. This is one of the core features that brings autonomy to a robotic vehicle.

What You’ll Learn

The lesson begins by showing how to physically and programmatically integrate the ultrasonic sensor with the servo motor. The servo rotates the sensor left and right, allowing it to scan the surroundings and detect nearby obstacles.

With Python code, the car uses sensor input to make real-time driving decisions. When an obstacle is detected within a specific range, the car stops, checks for the clearer path by scanning angles, and then turns in the direction with more space. The motors are controlled accordingly to execute these avoidance maneuvers.

While the lesson focuses more on behavior demonstration than full code breakdown, it gives you the logic and flow you need to build and customize obstacle avoidance for your own projects.

📦 Links to purchase the kit, view documentation, and download source code are available below this article.