So this is a video of our first successful full sized test of our robot which we will use to attempt to climb the ladder. It still has a few bugs that are being worked on.
Here is the video (sorry for the poor quality). It does not have the grabber mechanism mounted on the base yet, but it is being worked on.
As you can see there are some stability issues, but overall it is working. I believe you can program motor blocks into the code that prevent the motors from rotating, could one of those be used to help the stability?
Thanks for any help and comments,
Williamg
It looks cool but how do you plan on using it to climb the ladder?
~DK
We have two ideas, one is to use the legs to leverage itself onto the bottom rung of the ladder, then fold the legs to balance the bot. The other is to use an arm, stand the bot up, hook on, and then fold the legs up leaving the bot hanging 6" in the air.
That makes sense. Hope everything goes well with it.
~DK
are the “arm wheels” drivable too?
(with motors hooked up and everything)
It looks like the gearing on each of those wheel arms is very high - it looks like your bot is running the arms with barely any reduction at all! Maybe reducing it a tad will make it less jumpy.
Why raise your entire robot base up with four “arms” when you could just make one extending arm do that job?
In the original design, the “legs” wheel were drivable, but it turns out having the drive wheels located so far apart seriously hindered movement and the turn radius was huge. So we moved the drive wheels to the center of the base. As for why we made four legs instead of an arm to climb the ladder; the two other teams we have had attempted to use arms to get up the ladder, and failed. We believed the stress and strain on the engines from using an arm would be detrimental. If it is not located at the center of gravity and you try to haul yourself up bad things could happen. With the legs, you push up from the ground, giving you more leverage and less strain. As an analog we used, is it easier to do a push up or a pull up? With an arm the full weight of the robot is on one or two engines and metal. On this one the strain is spread out over the whole base. And it is a little jump (that could also be my bad camera work) supposedly we are getting about 62.5 ft/lb of torque with the current set up.