Cleansweep - Climber's minesweeping robot
I built this robot to compete in the "minesweeping" competition for the 2004 Western Canadian Robot Games. I thought the event idea was so cool I just had to go for it.
My design philiosphy was to make a robot as general purpose as possible but still be small and light enough to navigate the course and traverse any obstacles. I intend to use this robot for other projects so I made sure there was plenty of room for expansion in the form of accessible ports on the microcontroller, lots of power and a quick-mount system for various servos, robot arms, etc. By making the robot general purpose I can boil the task at hand down to make it conducive to software solution instead of a hardware solution. This isn't because I think hardware solutions are bad. It's just that I am much better at software than hardware and I am just capitalizing on my strengths!
About halfway down this web page is a description of the development progress starting just before I etched the mainboard.
The chassis consists of a box-jointed "lightply" (model airplane wood) case about 10cm wide, 16cm long and about 6cm high. Motive power comes from 4 copal 60:1 gearmotors hooked up to 4 Tamiya off-road tires using custom hubs made from brass and held on with 2mm bolts. I found the stock Tamiya tires too squishy so I inserted "inner tubes" I cut from a block of foam. Now they are just right. They flatten a little for traction but not so much that I lose too much ground clearance. With the tires in place the 'bot measures about 18cm wide and 16.5cm long. I am a little worried about weight because with the chassis, populated mainboard and battery it weighs about 600 grams. Add to that the minesweeping gear and sensor array I figger the weight could climb up to about 1000 grams. The robot is quite fast (for a bot that is supposed to be constrained into an 8' x 4' playing field) and can go about 40cm a second at full tilt.
Link to Site: http://members.shaw.ca/climber/sweeper.html
I built this robot to compete in the "minesweeping" competition for the 2004 Western Canadian Robot Games. I thought the event idea was so cool I just had to go for it.
My design philiosphy was to make a robot as general purpose as possible but still be small and light enough to navigate the course and traverse any obstacles. I intend to use this robot for other projects so I made sure there was plenty of room for expansion in the form of accessible ports on the microcontroller, lots of power and a quick-mount system for various servos, robot arms, etc. By making the robot general purpose I can boil the task at hand down to make it conducive to software solution instead of a hardware solution. This isn't because I think hardware solutions are bad. It's just that I am much better at software than hardware and I am just capitalizing on my strengths!
About halfway down this web page is a description of the development progress starting just before I etched the mainboard.
The chassis consists of a box-jointed "lightply" (model airplane wood) case about 10cm wide, 16cm long and about 6cm high. Motive power comes from 4 copal 60:1 gearmotors hooked up to 4 Tamiya off-road tires using custom hubs made from brass and held on with 2mm bolts. I found the stock Tamiya tires too squishy so I inserted "inner tubes" I cut from a block of foam. Now they are just right. They flatten a little for traction but not so much that I lose too much ground clearance. With the tires in place the 'bot measures about 18cm wide and 16.5cm long. I am a little worried about weight because with the chassis, populated mainboard and battery it weighs about 600 grams. Add to that the minesweeping gear and sensor array I figger the weight could climb up to about 1000 grams. The robot is quite fast (for a bot that is supposed to be constrained into an 8' x 4' playing field) and can go about 40cm a second at full tilt.
Link to Site: http://members.shaw.ca/climber/sweeper.html