Hi All:
We’re a group of Highschoolers looking to build a FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) sized robot (34” L x 23.25 ”) designed to pick up trash from the sides of highways. We were doing some brainstorming and came up with a couple of questions we’d like to ask more experienced people.
- Thoughts on weatherproofing our electronics? It’ll need at the minimum to withstand extended use in the sun for hours on end, with a stretch goal of being able to operate in the rain.
- We were planning to use the FRC control system for a proof of concept due to our familiarity with it, but it isn’t ideal for our use case (it’s overly expensive and has too short range). Any recommendations on alternate control systems (it needs to be robust, have a relatively long range, and be able to handle vision inputs and display them onto the driver station)
- One of the things our mentor for this project wants is to be able to pick up trash from bushes (think paper bags on branches and such). He especially wants us to look into using multi jointed arms. We know that these are probably too difficult to manufacture and control, but industrial grade 6-axis arms are a little bit out of our price range at least for our first robot, and we only really need 4-axis arms, so are there any good industrial grade 4-axis arms that are less expensive than 6-axis arms.
- We want to put a powered intake on the end of our arm because using a claw would be very slow. Unfortunately, we haven’t figured out a good way to intake trash off a bush without also intaking parts of the bush. Any recommendations?
Thanks for your time!