I’m interested in building a rover that only travels on very flat hardwood floors, two large drive wheels on center, and casters. I’m interested in good odometry on the drive wheels too, so ideally something that is easily compatible with an encoder of some sort that would give me decent resolution.
Sorta the opposite of my hex project, I’m interested in playing around with some control ideas for a bot that is very easy to manuever that allows focus on higher level problems like navigation and auto-docking.
In terms of size, it can be relatively large. I’ll probably want to stick a mini-ATX mobo onboard.
You are describing my W.A.L.T.E.R. bot almost perfectly! He’s two wheel drive, with a pair of GHM-04 motors, and will have the QME-01 encoders as soon as I attach them. I’ve been working on W.A.L.T.E.R. for almost a year now and am very excited about the conversion to using motors for locomotion. I have not decided for sure what will be the new brain for W.A.L.T.E.R., but am looking at alternatives to the Atom chips for cost reasons only. I want to experiment with odometry, speedometry, mapping, and actual learning from his environment. I never would have thought so much could be done with a simple rover setup such as this, but I have been having a great time with W.A.L.T.E.R. and expect to have much more.
I don’tknow the resolution of the encoders, but I’d look at using the usual center wheel drive setup with a sprung castor front and rear, and attach the encoders on the outside of the drive wheels instead of on the motors.
GHM-04 motor RPM under load = 7500 rpm
Encoder = 120 cycles per revolution
Encoder = 480 quadrature counts per revolution
Frequency = 15khz
3428 quadrature counts per inch with a 2.5" tire
Hi Andy
never thought i could give you advice
but mabe instead of castors since you,ll have a ITX you could use a mouse or use the castors and and a laser mouse that and wheel encoders could be extremily accurate
Wow! long time no see! Rover huh?