I've been lurking here for a while, and have been tossing around ideas in my head-- hoping to come up with something (somewhat) original to share with this awesome community.
While wondering around a Walgreens, I spotted this little red wagon on clearance, and realized I had found a chassis for my robot.
The wagon is much smaller than the standard Radio Flyer (the traditional red wagon), but it struck me as being just the right size for a household bot.
I have absolutely no clue what exactly it's going to do, but figuring that out should be fun.
Here's what I have figured out about it so far:
-It will use a single motor to drive the rear wheels, and a servo to handle steering the front wheels. This will be my first time venturing beyond skid steering, so that will be interesting.
-It will use an arduino clone for the "brains".
-It will most likely use a Sharp GP2D12 Infrared Range Finder to keep it from crashing into things (it's cheap, and I've already got one sitting around.
Beyond that, I will pretty much be figuring out things as I go.
Ackerman steering should certainly be something fun to do. I think the only reason it’s not usually done is because the the larger turn radius.
I don’t know about a single drive motor, I mean, as long as you can get it to drive both wheels simultaniously, you shouldn’t have a problem, I’m just not sure how you plan on doing that. =</p>
Sounds like a fun project, and certainly within the grasp of beginners!
It looks like it will be pretty easy to get the rear axle working off of a single motor. I’ve used a bit of JB Weld to secure one of the wheels to the axle, so it’s certainly not going anywhere, but I’ll probably use hot glue for the other side, just so I can remove the thing if needed. And I’ve got some gears from some old CD-ROM drives that fit it, and the motor I intend to use perfectly. I’m a bit nervous that they might end up getting stripped-out, but I think they’ll last long enough to get the other kinks worked out.
If I understand correctly, a normal car or other vehicle with standard front axle geometry would have a difference in the angle from the center of their turn to each of the front two wheels. The two front wheels on this wagon will pivot around a central point (you can see the pivot at the front center of the wagon). So the angle from the center of the turn to each wheel will be the same.
london taxi’s the old london taxis use ackerman taxis. because of the way the wheels move they dont have to slow down as much when cornering. must make them quite fun to drive apart from the sluggish 2.4 diesel under the bonnet.
