pic: Team 1114 Gearboxes

[Ian Mackenzie]

Thanks for the suggestions - the drive should be a lot smoother in a couple of days. There are a few code improvements that we were planning to make anyways, and we will be gearing up the potentiometers to get higher accuracy at the expense of reducing the number of revolutions the gearboxes can make (currently, we are using 10-turn potentiometers 1:1, which means an accuracy of about 3 degrees or so - we are going to change that to 2:1).

For the operator controls, the plan is to have the joystick control the translational velocity and a separate knob control the angular velocity of the robot - not only does this seem to have the simplest and most direct coding implementation, it makes sense because our driver is used to driving RC cars with the steering on a separate knob. So moving the joystick will simply move the robot without changing its orientation; turning the knob will spin the robot in place; straight ahead on the joystick and a turn of the knob will give tank-steering-like motion; sideways on the joystick and a turn of the knob will result in a "circle strafe", circling around an object while always pointing towards it.

We toyed with the idea of attempting a shifter, but that seemed a bit too ambitious - although next year, who knows?

[Holtzman]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

Very clever and compact gearbox & swerve design.

Nicely done.

Joe J.

P.S. I have just watched the videos. Looks even better. One think I know from experience is that the control software and the operator interface are key parts of getting the most out of machines with the nerve to swerve. I know these were just baby pictures, but it seems to me that you have a lot of work to do in both areas.

This is not a criticism, but just a heads up while there is still time to improve -- we were one of the early adopters of swerve and I have spent 10 all nighters (at least) trying to get the robot to behave.

One consequence of not getting it right is that the drivers tend to get into the "blame the machine" mode where whenever the robot is not working, it is the software's fault -- sometimes this is actually the case, but a lot of the time it was operator error and the operator did not get better because they did not look to themselves as the source of the problem. Think about it.

Finally, please don't take this as a criticism. I like your design quite a lot. You have chosen a difficult path -- I solute you. JJ

Thanks Joe

That means alot coming from you. With the help of Ian and Karthik, 1114 has come along way from the rookie 7 stack builder it was last year. I look forward to seeing you in Atlanta. Watch out for the canadians this year. We've already seen 188's nice new 6 motor shifting system, and 781's beautiful cnc work . Canadian regional should be very interesting


Tyler Holtzman