Getting a wheeled robot to walk up stairs
Kristen Dirmaier, Andrew Hubley, Alex Marcus
NEWS:
Stairzilla Lives!
Now observe as Stairzilla successfully climbs a stair! Please note that the only assistance it actually required was centering on the stair. Enjoy!
Completed Robot!
The robot is complete! Well, the body and controller anyways. As you can see in the below image, the controller was completed successfully (testing included):
The body has also been completed:
And all the servos have been connected to the basic stamp for programming:
Now we're working on getting the code up and running, hopefully we'll have a video of a (somewhat) working robot soon.
Reenforced Plastic and Controller
After an incident where the vertical sections of plastic fell off of Stairzilla, we reenforced them in a method similar to the wheel plastic walls with L-brackets.
Now the robot is nearing completion! As you can see, the battery holders are in place and all the servos are ready to roll. We may need to make some further alterations to the arms (they're a bit unstable), but that shouldn't be a major issue.
While Kristen and Andy were hard at work fixing the body, Marcus focused on working on the controller for the robot, which is where the "brain" of the bot is located.
Check back next time for some code and the finishing touches (hopefully some googly eyes!).
Wheels and Arms and Servos Oh My!
In the weeks after Spring Break we worked to get the wheels and arms attached to the Stairzilla. There was difficulty with attaching the servos vertically to the body, but it was solved with lots of epoxy and some L-brackets.
First we got the wheels attached:
Then we got the arms on:
Woo!
Break Work/Stairmaster v 0.2
During break 2/3 of our group met to get some work done on our robot. Kristen was very surprised!
After some brief re-working of the design, we cut out the body and arms in the VersaLaser cutting machine, which looks like this:
The actual cutting process is really cool. Here's a brief video to show what it's like:
The final result of the cutting is the main body of the robot, along with the arms (not shown):
We also started looking into how to convert the standard rotation servos into 360 degree rotating motor, with limited sucess:
Hopefully we'll be able to get this working in the coming weeks.
CAD Images
Our group got rolling on the physical part of creating our robot by cutting out the pieces of plastic that will comprise the robot's body and arm, complete with holes in the arms to install the servos. Here's a screenshot of the CAD drawing we made:
Lasers are fun!
The Stairs!
The group decided to use the stairs outside of the WAX lab as the stairs for the robot to climb.
They aren't standard by indoor measurements but they are in close proximity to the robotics lab, and therefore convenient.
The following is a diagram of the stairs in question:
Stairmaster v 0.1
We constucted a simple cardboard model of our initial plan. Note the arms used for lifting the robot front wheels onto the next stair. Also note the googly eyes.
Left side view
Front side
Right side
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