1. Principles and practices¶
Assignment:
- Plan and sketch a potential final project.
Getting an idea¶
First of all, I brainstormed for inspiration by looking for FabAcademy final projects from previous years and watching electronics project videos on YouTube, also thought about blending it with one of the projects whose development I am part of as part of my job at the Hochschule Rhein Waal; these were the possible ideas to follow:
- Coin Sorting Machine.
- Assistant for blind people.
- Wheeled robot.
- Soil sampler module.
Because of the wide applicability and possible future improvements, I chose to make an Omni-directional three-wheeled robot, of which I made one during the Fundamentals of digital fabrication 2020 course; but since I wasn’t completely satisfied with the results, I’ll make an improved version of this taking as foundation my Outlooks from that one.
Sketches¶
- Project idea:
- Omniwheel:
- Wheels rotation logic according to the direction of movement of the vehicle:
Project description¶
Omnidirectional system:
- An omnidirectional robot is the one that can be moved sideways without turning first, it can apply whether Mecanum-wheels or Omni-wheels (the ones I chose).
- An omni-wheel is made up of two parts: a main wheel (driven by its respective motor) and smaller rollers (driven not by its motor, but the rotation of the other omniwheels), which gives it the dual axis movement capacity.
Project operation:
- The movements of the vehicle will be given by a remote control.
- Vehicle:
* I’ll use whether DC gear motors or DC motor with an external gearbox.
- Remote control: I plan using joysticks to control the displacement and rotation movements.
- Communication: I plan using RF transceivers (which can be setup as transmitter or receiver).
Fabrication materials:
- Frames: Acrylic or MDF.
- Wheels: 3D printed in PLA.
Objective:
- This project is done for learning purposes.
- Since it is a vehicle, it doesn’t have a specific application on it’s own, it’s going to depend on different modules we can put on top of it.