Hey everyone, this is my first post but I’ve been keeping up with LMR for months now.
I'm starting to build my first homemade robot. I built several advanced mobile robots in grad school, and work with ...certain types of mobile robots professionally now. But building one on my own with my own tools (for cheap) is a new adventure that I'm looking forward to.
I have a pretty good collection of "stuff" to get me started like servos, dc motors, sensors, etc. And I'm going to try not to buy anything else, so it should turn out pretty original. For starters I don't have two similar motors, so I'm contemplating on making a tricycle robot. And I’m thinking about making two idle wheels in the front and have a single rear wheel steer and provide locomotion as opposed to the differential steer, or the traditional tricycle that has drive wheels in back and steers in front. Kind of like a real tricycle for little kids, but in reverse.I realize that the center of gravity will need to be close the drive/steer wheel, and that tricycles are susceptible to tipping over, so I’ll need to keep that in mind during the design. Have any of you ever seen anything like this?
I only have one choice for the microcontroller…and it is a beast…
It’s a Motorola/Freescale HCS12 mounted on a development board I got from http://www.evbplus.com/ (They call it Dragon12). I had to buy it for a class when I was in school. This thing is huge, but it has just about everything I’d ever need.
Starting off I’m just going to build the platform and implement an IR swivel head wall avoidance, but ultimately I plan on R&D-ing a means of indoors localization/mapping. I don’t want to get ahead of myself so I’ll stop here.
What do you guys think?
