Mindboards

Like my fellow followers of this forum, I love to look over robot designs. Although "grand" designs (like biped and rock crawler) are awe inspiring, I find more modest designs are actually a better source of inspiration for future projects.

So in order to motivate you to present your designs, grand or otherwise, I'd like to briefly present my latest design.
This is my third attempt at producing a simple, but robust platform for robot navigation experiments. It's sensor suite includes a forward quadrant touch sensor, a compass, a US sensor, and the feedback signals from the two drive motors. Although I'm not a real fan of castor robots, they are easier to build, program, and maneuver around complex urban environments, like my living room. Although I've already started to concentrate on the initial software load, there are still a lot of changes that I'd like to make to the hardware.

If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to continue to post updates to this topic or answer any questions you have.

But what I'd really like you to do is to take the time to open a new topic and at least briefly present your latest design.

Interesting design. I'll post some pictures of my test platforms when I get chance. I'm also no fan of caster wheels. One of the things I've found is that having the robot built so that most of the weight is on the main wheels helps a lot. But your robot looks like a fair amount of weight is on the caster, does it work ok?

Andy

This is one I designed together with Juan Antonio Breña Moral for educational purposes. It has a very light design and has many points on which you can attach sensors. It doesn't require a lot of pieces to make. It has space on the back for a HiTechnic MUX.



There are quite a number of pictures on the Picasa album for it here: [LINK]

- Xander

~Xander, Nice screen cover Good idea, for those with a bad screen Oh, and nice robot as well

gloomyandy wrote:But your robot looks like a fair amount of weight is on the caster, does it work ok?

Andy

Good observation. I read some where that there should be only about 25% of the weight on the caster, but I have closer to 30%. Nevertheless, it seems to drive OK. However, the excess weight could make the odometry less accurate.

Xander, I love your design. Compact, eloquent, wonderfully put together, a classic piece of industrial design.