What I hope my Robot will (someday) do: - Autonomously Explore Planetary Surfaces (Earth, my backyard, to start with) - Autonomous Suveillance - Autonomous Search & Rescue - Possibility to take over Robot via R/C - Automatically search and find Charger or Solar Power Source - Play a game of Chess
I tried a similar tank platform as that one and the tracks came off very easily. The one I used was the “D” in the pictures at the bottom of that webpage. I’ve had much better luck with the Dagu Rover 5 tracked platform. The Dagu tracks never come off.
I really like your idea! I read that you want to do this project on Arduino. I would like to recommend you some less known platform on which you can base your project. The company is called Husarion and is from Poland. Their Core2 product contains probably everything you need. On the STM board, programmable in C ++, 4 H bridges (for example, to control the running platform) of the servo output (for control of the arm and the camera). Core2 is fully compatible with RaspberryPi, where you can run ROS (Robot Operating System), so you can easily start up camera support and autonomous robot control. In addition, Husarion offers cloud services that you can control your robot from around the world via the internet (Wi-Fi for Core2 is by Raspberry or WiFi ESP module).
I bought a couple of those arms to play around with. The motors they use are plain 3.3VDC, not stepper motors, which was a complication for my project.
Do you plan on replacing the motors with steppers? If so, please let me know which ones you find that do the job, otherwise there is a modification I have seen that adds a counter to the first gear in each gearbox. I can dig out the link if you need it as I think I have it somewhere.
I really like your idea though and may try something similar myself, so am going to follow your progress
Most of the mechanical things are done now. This was the easy part.
I placed the arm on top of the tank, just to see how it looks. Already looks great, but I decided to lower the base of the arm deeper into the body of the tank. It will look better, and give the rover a lower centre of gravity.
Now comes a difficult part: I must connect the arm and the tank to an Arduino, but none of the motors are stepper motors. So I think I will connect opto-couplers to all motors (5 in the arm, and 2 in the tank) so the Arduino can count the rotations of the motors.
Pretty cool concept ! How do you intend to isolate it from the environment (whether it’s temperature, atmosphere, etc…) to fulffill the missions you listed ?
