Major Problems being worked out...
So our goal with Agent M was to drive up the pole...This would be hard enough, if the pole was just a straight shot, but with those stupid rails in the way...
Our original thoughts were that by using these weird "tri-wheels" we could drive up the pole, and when one of the small the wheels met an obstacle the entire wheel would simply flip over driving over the problem areas on the pyramid...
In the original design had four of these wheels mounted at 90 degrees, so that the wheels would sort of cup the pole as the robot drove up. The idea was that the robot would flip the wheels as it went over the horizontal bars robots can hang from.
We realized that as the wheels rotated around they would do two things...First the wheels would crash into each other and bind. Our next solution to that problem was to switch to three wheels, and off set them so that only one wheel would be flipping over at any given time. Here again we ran into trouble. As the wheels flip over the longer leg moves down into the center position. This would push the robot side ways instead of up and over. When the robot came back down it would no longer be lined up with the pole which would result in an expensive fall!
We were seriously close to giving up on the plan all together and starting over when we noticed an old robot I made a number of years ago that had a suspension system. I keep it up on top of a cabinet where I am sure it will fall off and crush me some day. :-)
In any case after reviewing how it works we came up with the plan of mounting the tri-wheel assembly's on springs. It is our hope that when the wheels encounter the barrier and begin to rotate around, as they lift up the springs will absorb the travel smoothing out the robots ascent and maintaining the wheels contact with the pyramid at all times.
The shock mounts give the triwheels 3 inches of travel. Of course we are banking on a whole lot of things working together...We can only hope that things will work the way we expect them to. If not...I guess we can dump disks in the 1 point slot.
(It will work...It will work...It will work...Our new team mantra)
Finally today we worked on making the shocks smaller. Garret and Mr. McGinnis managed to shave about three inches off of them which will give us much more room for electronics. We have to work hard to keep as much of the weight possible low and forward which means this robot isn't going to handle very while it is on the ground.
Maybe we should rename it SLOTH. :-p
I'm sure we will run into more problems as we continue on with this design and build. Here is to it all coming together in the end.
Edoga