Thread: What would you like on a robot if time, money, or weight weren't a restriction?
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Unread 26-11-2014, 11:21
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Michael Hill Michael Hill is offline
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What would you like on a robot if time, money, or weight weren't a restriction?
Basically, what would you put on your "dream" robot (still keeping with the other robot restrictions, i.e., motors, etc.)?

On mine, I'd like to use a LOT more sensors. I'm talking pressure transducers in my pneumatics, thermocouples monitoring motors and their controllers, strain gages on my structures.

I would like to be able to disengage a motor completely, but also change the overall gear ratio to keep the same top speed (or acceleration, haven't decided) sans a motor. That would mean I could drop down from 3 motors to 2 motors on the fly so if I'm drawing too much current, I won't trip my breaker.

I'd like to fully characterize all the motors, batteries and everything in between used so PIDs/LQRs can be even better designed.

I'd like a full IMU suite complete with constant-drift gyros, 6-axis accelerometers, magnetometers, and be able to pull in quadrature encoders from the wheels, then characterize during all modes of robot operation (so motor magnetic fields can be compensated for). I'd also like to include fiducials from the vision system. Then I'd fuse everything together with a properly designed Kalman Filter (preferably all implemented in an FPGA).

Oh to dream...in reality, I'd just like 2 weeks of driving practice. Is that too much to ask for?