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Alyssa Dixon, Dhru Patel, Jin Wu, Sagar Bhatta
Summary/Overview:
Give people some idea about the problem you want to solve and how you want to solve it. This section will start off very basic during the proposal period, but you will expand it as the project goes on.
Table of Contents:
These will be links to pages you create with each step of the project. For the proposal, you will create a new sub-page and link it below.
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Navigation of complex terrain is crucial for robotic vehicles used in rescue and exploration. In these situations, vehicles need to be able to climb over steep ledges and into small crevices. There is a tradeoff between these two abilities depending on the diameter of the vehicle’s wheels, as large diameters can climb over obstacles while small diameters can fit into tight spaces. Our robot will contain a mechanism to increase its wheel diameter to climb edges and decrease the diameter to duck into small spaces. This effectively solves the problem and creates a more robust system for vehicles being used in rescue and exploration
For our project we successfully designed and implemented variable-radii wheels which increased radius by over 50% (5cm → 7.8cm) when installed on a robotic vehicle like that from build assignment two. An attached joystick was used to move the car, and pushing the joystick button would toggle between the small and large wheel radius configurations.
Image of final build:
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[Insert Final video]
Table of Contents: