Good Textbook Source for Robot Design

[Kai Zhao]

I've aways wished that there are good textbooks that would help a team learn about the intricacies of good robot/drive train design. After searching quite a while, I found a textbook written by "Stock Drive Products" that is quite useful.

http://www.sdp-si.com/catalogs.htm
They are willing to mail the books free of charge to individuals and educators, and they have a not-so-navigatable online version. (The book mentioned is the last one on that page.

Does anyone know of any other good, in-print (or online) books, that would be relavent to the FIRST crowd? On mechanics, electronics, etc?

-Kai Zhao

[Frank(Aflak)]

Good find! I applied for a free copy (although I am not sure if I will actually recieve one . . ), and it looks like it would be very useful.

Unfortunatly, I don't know any good textbooks on robot (or any mechanical machine) design. I might be able to tell you in a year, when I'm an engineering student, but even then I will be a freshman and probably only have intro textbooks. I hope to learn the intricacies of design from joining various research teams instead of in the classroom, anyway. We will see.

Again, thanks for the link.

[Stu Bloom]

. . . although I am not sure if I will actually recieve one . . .This is a very good source of reference information, and yes, you will receive it, and likely sooner than you expect. I ordered the complete set of catalogs/ref material some time ago and it all arrived promptly.

[Nick R.]

to tell you the truth, dont go looking to far; your school or local public library should have some good stuff.

I found a lot of books on car mechanics and ascociated topics in my school library so i looked for books in the public one and found even more.

In addition, the site: www.howstuffworks.com (http://www.howstuffworks.com)
can give you lots and TONS of ideas, those are basicaly real life situation with extraordinary simple solutions.
e.g. convertibles, windshield wipers, gearboxes, helicopters (main rotor control mechanism is amazing, good videos too) and lots of lots of more stuff like that.

Enjoy

[DanL]

Last year, someone linked to a book called Build Your Own Combat Robot (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0072194642/qid=1074182915/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-0641696-9792115?v=glance&s=books). I Amazon'ed it to my house, and sure enough, it is a good resource. Goes through a lot of key concepts including motor curves, drivetrain considerations, gearing ratios, wheel selection and size calculations, etc. Although some sections are geared (ahaha... no pun intended) towards the battlebots crowd ("Weapon Design"), robot design is robot design. Theres enough in it to make it worth the 20 bucks.