Hey RoboPeople, so my team is thinking of making an outreach bot that looks like K9, does anyone have any suggestions to make this realistically possible? Or any other ideas?
Thanks!
This is a great idea! And also completely possible. It just all depends on the kind of functionality you would like it to have. Could you provide a few more details so we know more about it? (ie how in depth you want to go, what its going to do, etc.)
In addition to functionality, remember to “make it loud” in the spirit of the new FIRST initiative. Mecanum wheels, for example, will make your movement impressive to virtually anybody you demonstrate to. As a general rule of thumb, never doubt the power of obscene amounts of LEDs to draw eyes to your robot.
You may have already seen this but it may be useful to draw some inspiration from.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Podpadstudios-K9-Dr-Who/
Also, check out the website for the company that built it. He builds robots from TV shows all for charity 
A popular one that my team hopes to build this off-season is a t-shirt cannon I know 254 has a great example on their website
Juggling robot using vision tracking 
Doritos cannon on a rear wheel drive/front wheel crab-module steer regolith drive train.
It would drift and dispense tasty, fattening snacks.
I also recommend mecanum wheels simply because crowds love them. Every year at our outreach events the thing that the public loves most about the to it is the wheels. I am able to share our CAD files and experiences with them if you are interested
As others have mentioned, mechanums would be very showy and impressive, but a well designed swerve IMO would be much cooler, not to forget it’s good practice for mechanical team and programming team to make it work.
a suggestion. Partner up with a specific sponsor (or two) to work on it.
In the time before the 2012 season, we partnered up with UTC, and collaborated with CT FIRST. UTC helped fund the whole project, and CT FIRST approved the ideas.
Our product was an outreach bot (we call it a showbot) named “Benny the Buttonbot” its a humanoid shaped robot, that can be taken apart into sections for transportation (Chassis, Legs, Torso, Head, Arms). Benny has the ability to drive around, and has bumpers that if touched (by human or wall) will disable the drive motors (safety FIRST). Its stomach is actually a crane game using an electromagnet. The magnet picks up buttons and deposits it into an arm thats hollow so that it will fall into its hand. (Buttons allow us to customize it for any event). Lastly its head is a interactive tablet, that allows kids to play games like tic-tac-toe, or trivial pusuit, or we can play videos or display picture.
Overall its a GIANT hit with adults and kids
(if anyone wants i can hunt for some pictures)
For a canine, you could make it with lots of moving parts (legs, mouth, tongue, etc.) and sensors for inputs (a pressure sensor for shaking paws, sitting down, etc.). Don’t make it scary, though!
Some ideas I’ve thrown around for fun:
- 12 CIM, two-speed mecanum
- A programmed “Rube Goldberg” machine with cRIO and a lot of I/O’s
- A redesigned shooter deck for our competition robot that incorporates a tightly-packaged linear shooter
- Use the competition robot to play frisbee with kids (low power, light tosses)
Two of our team’s mentors and myself are working on version 3 of a small robot controlled by a Wii Balance board, dubbed the Wi-bot. In our experience, it is a great tool for getting students (and adults) interested in the technology.
Whatever you decide to build, keep in mind the surfaces that your robot will be operating on. Mechanum wheels work nicely on FRC carpet, but the harshness of bumpy asphalt will make them prone to failure. From our experience as a team, our best outreach events have been on pavement and/or outdoors, not on carpet. If you want to please the crowd with omni-directional driving, then do a swerve because you can use wheels that will have easy-to-replace tread. Parades are really nice outreach events, but after driving the robot a couple of miles on the street, there won’t be much left of your Mechanum wheels.
Yes please!
I believe OP was referring to K9 from Doctor Who, not an actual dog 
Very detailed plans, very cool! Though I’m 90% sure there will be some kind of licensing issues associated with building one.
For A While Now I Have Wanted To Create Something Much Like 254’S Shockwave As A Show bot.
Omar from Cross the Road Electronics had a cool bot with a nerf gun on it that he automated, haven’t seen it in a while, but it’s always fun for people to interact with. If you want to be super elaborate you could also add vision tracking to it.
Oh man! Two nerf guns, two vision-tracking cameras. It could be like that one James Bond car with the auto-tracking guns, try to get it to shoot stuff out of the air. That would be so cool!
We would have a chair bot, with mecanum wheels, wall ball cannon at 60psi, and was able to control the robot via kinect. We also had speakers that was made from parts of some broken speakers as a project.
Sadly we had to cannibalize it for this year’s robot.
We might think of something different for the future, like pneumatics to raise the frame up and down.