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The idea of having a wheels too far apart causing the autobot to get stuck reminds of issues we had thinking about this year"s FIRST game involving the ramp. There will probably be ditches and slight bumps that will be large enough to cause problems for 4 wheels, but if we"re going to build the chassis ourselves and just use a premade motor, why not use six wheels instead of four? This would help us clear ditches deep enough to get the front wheel stuck in, rocks or fallen trees big enough to catch the underside of the autobot, or patches of mud that compromise the traction of two or three of the wheels (and it would look alot cooler than anything with only 4 wheels).
As to object aversion, there are ultrasonic sensors that come with a servo and a small circuitboard that check distances between the sensor and surrounding objects. Coupling several of these at different levels with the velocity given by the GPS unit, a usable map of distances and heights between the autobot and its surroundings could be created which could be used for plotting the course.
(And just for fun and appeal to The DARPA, I think we should put a turret on the top with a pyrometric sensor and a digital camera that snaps pictures of everything living thing and autobot it comes across and pitch it as a "target recognition and tracking device")
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