Team 1787 is proud to present the official concept design of our offseason drivetrain.
By tearing down a Boston Dynamics Spot robot, we were able to find out every part needed to recreate our own Spot robot dog :D.
Of course, a simple clone of the robot for our drivetrain just simply isn’t enough for us (we are an ambitious team after all), so we decided to go all out and upgrade the drivetrain to have an MK4i Swerve Module on each leg for greater mobility.
After many long days and nights of discussion, we decided that even that isn’t a mobile enough drivetrain for us, so the next logical step was to replace the billet wheel with mecanum wheels to truly let us explore every inch of the field.
As the drivetrain has legs, it is also able to function as a shooter of sorts as it can simply kick cargo really hard into the upper hub without need for an intake.
We are still finalizing some aspects of our drivetrain for a potential offseason robot, such as painting it orange, but I was wondering if anybody sees any negative aspects to the drivetrain design that may hinder us at offseason events this year.
Drivetrain CAD:
1787OffseasonDrivetrain.STEP 1787OffseasonDrivetrain.x_t
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It doesn’t use a differential swerve drive
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So, this poses some challenges to the code…
Normally, the modules are in fixed positions and you just indicate those positions with fixed dimensions that get used in the math to calculate the correct angles and speeds to use to create the desired robot movements. With this design, the location of the modules are now variables. You can, of course, solve for those variables based on the pose of the legs fairly easily and feed that into the swerve portion of the code, but I suspect this will cause some undesirable feedback between the pose of the legs and the pose of the modules that might wreak havoc with your PID tuning…
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Well that is only our drivetrain design (a drone cannot drive, it can only fly), we still are designing some sort of mechanism that utilizes 12 NEO motors and a long piece of string to spin plywood around really fast to generate lift. We are thinking that reverse engineering an airplane engine may also have useful applications in this offseason robot.
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We are confident that custom Scratch add-ons as well as teaching everyone on the team how to use Scratch block coding will give us the student output power required to make this a reality.
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I’m unsure if this thread or the shoe thread are better indicators of the official start of Summer CD.
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Unfortunately they were not innovative enough to use mecanum wheels. The addition of them with the swerve modules allows for much greater mobility than your average JPL robot wheel.
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This is better than swerve, this is Swerve Squared.
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You’ll be wanting a 4907 style hook to snag the TRAVERSE RUNG after you jump.
Why not run the propellers in reverse to generate downforce? That way you can switch to differential and have it be worthwhile 
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Where ya gonna put the bumpers?
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What, you’ve seen corner bumpers before. Put one on each swerve module and the rest of the space between the modules is just a frame cutout…
Measuring the frame perimeter ought to be interesting. Inspectors don’t like it when you use code to stay within height or, in this case, frame perimeter limits…
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Mumble, grumble, non-articulated structure bumble.
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Clearly we need to put in a question on “how do we handle legged robots”? Right after the "my sponsor donated a $100,000 part. Can I use it on my robot?
Spot is SUPER cool to see (and drive!) in person, and does amazing work on ridiculous stuff that a human would walk around!
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Ban wheels and require robots to wear sneakers?
This is Summer CD, right?
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We’re just doing it to save the carpet! Honest!
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