Hey guys. I am a senior Mechanical Engineering major and I am currently working with 4 other people on our senior project. To save the long story, our project is to build a robot that preforms a certain task. We have the design mostly done, however we are having major issues with the electronic portion of the project. The robot will have a rectangular frame, with treads on both sides, 2 wheels in the front with drive motors on each wheel, and 2 non powered wheels in the rear. The robot when fully loaded will weigh 300 pounds. We want a speed of about .75-1 meters per second. It doesn’t have to have lighting fast acceleration, but the faster the better. The whole robot must be controlled over wifi. So here are my questions: What motors would you recommend?
How could we control the motors? I am very unfamiliar with this area, so feel free to assume I know nothing. Someone suggested Arduino. I understand what that is but the actual HOW to connect everything.
Basically, everything electronic. Please any advice you could give would be so helpful. It would be nice to have someone to talk on the phone or video conference our team, but this is not required at all.
A 300 pound robot is actually incredibly heavy and you might even start considering a gas powered DC motor.
You can get an idea of the DC motor specs you need by plugging in known information here:
robotshop.com/blog/en/drive- … -tool-9698
You’ll need to at least be in the range of the CIM motor plus gearing:
robotshop.com/en/banebots-fi … motor.html
Ex: robotshop.com/en/banebots-p8 … RB-Ban-214
Note that motor controllers which can provide the current needed for the CIM motor are quite expensive:
robotshop.com/en/high-power- … llers.html
The following tutorial should help guide you through the process of building a custom robot:
robotshop.com/blog/en/how-to … son-1-3707