Thought you guys might find this
interesting...
For one of my introductory engineering
courses, I
and two other people have to design and build a robot capable of foward
motion
over various terrains using two servo motors (cyan). The catch is
that the
servo motors only output 180 degrees of motion, leaving us to try
and figure out how to convert this into circular
motion.
The design I came up looks like a tank and uses gears (red)
and ratcheting
treads (yellow) to keep the robot moving foward on both cycles of
the servo
motion. The wheels attached to the gears (transparent dark orange)
have to
be semicircles or else they would coincide. I can get away with
with that
because the motors only rotate them 180 degrees anyway. There's
more about
it at http://www.creativemechatron
ics.com
I modeled the design in Rhino and then
exported for
a pretty POV-Ray rendering to give my class a visualization of our
project
before we build it. The tread and the wheels coincide which is why
the wheels bleed through the tread. I didn't bother
taking
the time to slightly offset the tread.
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