Initial Designs

With the claw design sorted, I can now move on to thinking about how the whole thing is going to fit together. Then parts could be chosen and ordered. The very first thing that was decided upon would be that the house robot would be 4 wheel drive. Because of the weight limit, most antweights can only have 2wd. However, because I don't have a weight limit it would be a good idea to have 4wd as I would have more grip meaning I could easily move other robots without them moving me.

Pololu gearmotor

Speaking to previous years competitors and looking at bots from the antweight world series, I was shown to a range of micrometal gearmotors which could give out a very high amount of torque for the size of the motors. I decided to use one of these motors however the exact gear ratio would be decided upon later.

With this in mind, I made my first design on Sketchup. Google Sketchup conveniently has a 3-d warehouse where you can download models made by other people. These are often to scale so really helped save time when making this initial design. Both a servo and the gearmotors had been modelled before by other people so I could download them and add them to the design.

With that in mind I had my first initial design:

After I made this I showed it to a few of the previous years competitors and they gave me some feedback including enclosing the wheels so they are armoured for enemy bots and flipping the claw upside down to be able to get a better grip on enemy robots and also because it looks cooler.

This lead me on to my next design, which also incorporates a pneumatic hammer, which I will discuss in my next blog post.