So in a hurried attempt to get something submitted to Robot Wars, I came up with the idea for a heavyweight pyramid/wedge type robot. Having never built a robot before, I came on to this lovely website and quickly realised the world of robotics has changed since I last designed or researched how to build a robot. So now have scaled back the robot somewhat, and on advice, going to build a featherweight.
Starting with the chassis, the frame of the robot will be built from bamboo. It's a light material, cheaper than steel and around the same sort of strength, and means I can build something straight away without having to find welding equipment. The skin of the robot is still to be decided. I had originally thought 6mm steel on the skirts and other areas where the robot will likely take a lot of bashes, with the rest of the skin coming from polycarbonate sheets.
Weaponry comes from a flipper, which would have a sensor of some sort (pressure pad or optical) which would trigger a Raspberry Pi Zero to trigger the flipper at the optimal time. This should reduce the waste of precious gas!
For defence I have two ideas. The first is to make this robot a "ground effect" machine, with the robot being sucked to the ground. inside the armoured skirt would be a rubber skirt which would seal the machine to the ground. This would, hopefully, improve grip and mean I could run with no ground clearance. Along with this, in the inevitable event where someone gets underneath, I would have a gyroscope attached to the same Raspberry Pi that would monitor the X-axis of the machine. So if it was to be tipped over to the right, the Pi would instruct a movable counterweight inside the robot to move towards the part of the machine that is titled up. Hopefully I think this would make it harder to flip over or correct the issue straight away. But it's a limited weight category, and whether or not I could get sufficient weight or not to be the counter weight remains to be seen.
That's all I have so far in terms of design. I will be going out to get some bamboo canes during the weekend and start to work out what components to get. Currently I bought two 12v windscreen wiper motors that used to be in a Transit Van on the basis of motors connected to long wiper arms would be quite torquey.
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