Robot Cart

[gracie.]

Our team's cart is simple, just a folding cart fitting with a solid base of wood and some nice handles. If there was an improvement I would make on it, it would be a place to hold the driver's station. Our driver often has trouble carrying our station (which is very fancy custom acrylic and aluminum) through the crowded pits. If you can get both of those in inexpensively, I'd say it's mission accomplished.

[BlacksmithWoods]

Originally Posted by gracie.

Our team's cart is simple, just a folding cart fitting with a solid base of wood and some nice handles. If there was an improvement I would make on it, it would be a place to hold the driver's station. Our driver often has trouble carrying our station (which is very fancy custom acrylic and aluminum) through the crowded pits. If you can get both of those in inexpensively, I'd say it's mission accomplished.

You wouldn't happen to have a picture of it would you? This is exactly what our team wants to do.

[gracie.]

Originally Posted by BlacksmithWoods

You wouldn't happen to have a picture of it would you? This is exactly what our team wants to do.

oh no! we'd never thought to photograph the cart, so i don't have one, but it's basically this thing on the left :
http://img1.classistatic.com/cps/po/...828d0n_27.jpeg

except it has longer handles, and an attached wooden base of FIRST robot dimensions. You can slide it back and forth between a dolly and a cart for the robot. The handles are just long enough the prop the driver's station on if necessary to wheel it around, but like I said- we haven't really fixed that problem yet. hope that helps.

[Retired Starman]

Pneumatic tires might seem like a good idea until you get to a competition and have a flat. Some of those small ones are difficult to inflate, and if you get a real leak in one, they don't roll too well. I'd stick with something that doesn't need to be inflated.

Dr. Bob

Chairman's Award is not about building the robot. Every team builds a robot.

[kjohnson]

Remember your cart needs to fit through a standard 36" doorway.

[EricH]

You could look into getting an AndyMark cart and customizing it.

[ToddF]

We have an aluminum platform cart with a removable handle.

Attached to the deck are two 8020 cross bars. On top of those are two longerons. On the longerons are posts that support the robot. By adjusting the locations of the longerons and posts, we can fit the cart to each year's robot. The height of the posts are set so the robot just clears a standard doorway. If necessary, the posts can be trimmed or swapped out to increase or decrease the robot height.



As shown in the pic, the crossbars and longerons also make a convenient place to stick stuff when working on the robot.



The cart design is evolving. Last year the height was great for standing and working on the robot, but we couldn't go through doors. This year, we dropped the post height to fit through doors, and the robot ends up at the perfect height to work on while sitting in a chair.

Next step is to add stowage for the operator console, tools, and water for competitions. We had stowage for bumpers last year, but may leave them off the cart this time.

[BlacksmithWoods]

^^

[robonis]

I totally agree with keeping it simple, as long as the robot can be transported on the cart and is able to be suspended on the robot with stability

[smcmahon]

Todd,

Can you tell me more about the base of this cart? Did you buy it or is it all custom? I really like this design!

Originally Posted by ToddF

We have an aluminum platform cart with a removable handle.

Attached to the deck are two 8020 cross bars. On top of those are two longerons. On the longerons are posts that support the robot. By adjusting the locations of the longerons and posts, we can fit the cart to each year's robot. The height of the posts are set so the robot just clears a standard doorway. If necessary, the posts can be trimmed or swapped out to increase or decrease the robot height.

As shown in the pic, the crossbars and longerons also make a convenient place to stick stuff when working on the robot.

The cart design is evolving. Last year the height was great for standing and working on the robot, but we couldn't go through doors. This year, we dropped the post height to fit through doors, and the robot ends up at the perfect height to work on while sitting in a chair.

Next step is to add stowage for the operator console, tools, and water for competitions. We had stowage for bumpers last year, but may leave them off the cart this time.

[1502]

We made ours with 1/16 wall 1" steel square tubing that was student welded. A set of EXTRA BEEFY mecanum wheels that make it a breeze to maneuver and some nice bearings that allow it to be pushed in any direction with one finger while having 400 lbs on its bed. It can have 12 batteries on board and nice tool set. It can handle a 4" high wire bump with ease. It has adjustable rails that the robots' dead axles sit on so we cant test the drive train and easily work from under the robot. It soon will be motorized and will use 4 AM Super Shifters that have a gear taken out of them so we can shift into neutral to make it really easy to push. It'll also have underglow and headlights for loading/unloading at night. But one of my favorite feature's is that with the removal of two pins that hold a rail on, you can flip up part of the middle tray and it becomes a comfy 2 person couch (it'd be really fun at demo's!) perfect for the practice field and when our drive team is exausted. Still no pictures, but there coming.

[DjScribbles]

Our students built a new cart shortly after the stop build date. The design is alot like ToddF's pictures, except a bit longer and shorter (it fits under doors). They made a simple frame out of PE20 aluminum (I think thats what it was); put lexan on the bottom of the frame along with a pad so someone could climb under the robot and work (or nap; it even has an elevated piece of lexan with a headrest), we can store bumpers, balls, batteries, and/or drivers station down there too when it's queueueueing time.

The lengthwise supports are adjustable easily enough (for forward compatibility), and support the robot by the frame instead of the wheels, so the wheels can spin freely.
We also attached some PVC tubes as tool/flag holders.

[gyroscopeRaptor]

Although I unfortunately don't have pics right now our cart is all custom. Our welders bent some 1 inch tubing to make a base that's wide and long enough to hold three bins plus our driver station and a battery on top of the bins, then an elevated U-shape bent from the same tubing. The U-shape is the width of the inside section of the C-Base long configuration frame, so the robot rests there. The wheels can free spin there, and we used it for testing motors often.

We have two simple lcoking casters and two fixed wheels, larger than 6 inches to get over the cord bumps at MN North Star's venue. The casters were from Minnesota Casters, a distributor in MN. Gotta love our sponsors.

[Joseph Smith]

We made a cart before build season this year. It is an extruded aluminum frame, covered with aluminum plate. The sides of the shelves are black powder coated aluminum with our logo cut out by waterjet. The shelves hold tools, batteries, and our charger. The handles are chrome bmx pegs and the wheels are jumbo casters that we salvaged from some huge steel trolleys donated to us by General Motors. The robot is held off of it's wheels by four pieces of extruded aluminum.