My new project (and first after playing with squarebot) is to make a two wheeled bot that once moving can balance and lean into turns. I hope this hasn’t been done yet.
By the way, I will be stealing the design for my front wheel from Technic-R-C (gallery) and I hope you don’t mind.
I can’t wait to get started on this. I have some idea of a weight that would pivot on the turn of the front wheel to adequately lean the bike into turns.
I will post here with updates and pictures for anyone who is interested.
http://www.vexrobotics.com/vex-tomahawk.shtml
Cut that in half.
They use a servo to make it lean, its the easiest way.
So yes, its somewhat been done, but they needed two wheels to balance it.
Ok, theirs is way more impressive that what I mean to come up with. However I still think I’ll try mine, as it is slightly different.
My idea would be an actual bicycle and therefore have only two wheels, and a small “kick stand” for it to rest on when stopped. It would have to be able to take off from the “kick stand” with out assistance.
The main issue is that with only two wheels one cannot manipulate the frame to lean. Therefore I think I’ll have to simulate a “cyclist” somehow to lean into the turns.
Here is a quick mockup of the design I am starting to experiment with. It is very very simple and relies on the fact that a balance bike will stay upright when going at the right speed.
You could use something similar to that for the front wheel.
If you had a handle with that kit, you could just attach the handle to a shaft and that to an optical shaft encoder, which then sends a signal to the swerve servo.
that way you don’t have to make a mechanism that physically turns the wheel, you could use the simpler, and cooler, ‘virtual’ handle
I finished building my design over the weekend. After some testing I found that the bot had to get up to some substantial speed before it would balance. I don’t have a large testing area so I found this impractical. I gave up and just turned it into a cool trike.
Well I added a picture of it to the gallery before breaking it all down again. I already have an idea for an even more exciting project which I plan to get started on this weekend.
