[UPDATE 02/25/2014] Hi, what's going on guys?
I've been busy with the college stuff, almost don't have time for de parallel projects anymore, but still thinking a lot of it. Well, I decided to call this robot Botzilla Mark II because the study of the whegs technology made me think about take the original Botzilla intelligence and eletronics and the Botzilla Mark II mechanics and put it all together, improving some new systems and creating a complete fully-operational Botzilla Mark III for both outdoor and indoor surveillance services. As you can see in the newest video, the Mark II can navigate easily in a flat surface (it does the job very well in irregular environment too, but I couldn't make a video showing it) and climb obstacles (the one in the video have about 4,3 inches of height), but the mechanic design don't allows the robot to do the complete job. The solution for this: a four-wheeled (or whegged... lol) motorized mechanic design. Something like this:
Thats not very easy because I'm having a lot of work trying to find the correct motors and since I started the project, I couldn't find nothing. :/
Well, my research continues and I hope to find the motors to start building Botzilla Mark III.
This is what I have for you, I hope to bring some good news soon as possible.
[/UPDATE]
Hi people, how your projects are going? hahaha Well... I made a search in google for modern locomotion systems and I found one that catch my attention: the whegs. The idea of making a wheel that works like legs was awesome and I found some robots from universities around the world which inspired me for building my own whegs system. Two things were important to make this decision: the first thing is that in Brazil, where I live, the new technologies takes a long time to arrive and, when they do, they are too expensive. The second one is that the brazilian state where I live. Here technologies don't arrive almost never and, when they do, they are much more expensive than the other states in de country, for my sadness. hahahaha So, based on this two geographic circunstances I decided to research data and build the whegs myself, as I said. With some patience and some time I build this remote controlled robot to see if a real exploration robot with lot of sensors and eletronics stuff is possible. I think the answer is yes, but I need some money for make investments on motors, eletronics and many other things and unfortunatelly I don't have much money now :/ But I'm happy with this robot. I'm thinking of build an "Botzilla Mark II" with this whegs locomotion... I don't know... Maybe an professor on my Eletric Engineering college wants to take this project as an research and development program. Let's hope so. To finish this posting, I can't give you precise information about the remote control and the motors because everything was taken from garbage toys and videos from Sharp. I'm sorry guys :/ . But here is the motors:
I hope you like it. See you guys.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/botzilla-mark-ii-a-k-a-experimental-whegs-robot