pic: Vex Teaser: What's Art been up to lately?

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by jgraber

Nice work on the worm gear. Now that it is a few months later, how did it go?
Were you able to make a "South Pointing Chariot"?

Somewhat. I got about 70% done with it, but at that point the number of gears required to mechanically keep it "pointing South" was taking a toll on the motors and causing the robot to drift badly. This was just meant as a kind of interesting experiment in gearing, and nothing more really.

Was it to make your holonomic drive "driver centric"?

That's still a work in progress; I have the a KoP gyro at my house, and I'm waiting on an order from Futaba for keyed connectors to make a jumper cable to go from FRC-style female leads on their sensors to the Vex-style male leads. Even once I get them, it probably wouldn't be until a vacation break, like Thanksgiving, when I would actually have enough time to start programming an absolute holonomic drive.

You might also consider just doing the integration computationally, based on optical wheel encoders on the drive wheels or drag wheels.

I could of did that, but I just wanted to play around with differential gearing to create a complex mechanical-computer type of thing, just for fun. If I was serious about finding the exact location of the robot, I would have picked something much simpler.