Design
/ Build Report - 02-21-02
Vigilante is a very unique and interesting design, I was not
happy with just bolting together a robot with off the shelf
components, I pride myself in being smarter than that.
The Vigilante design is very simple from a mechanical standpoint,
it is nothing more than a high speed blade laying flat traveling
extremely close to the floor. The entire robot is run from direct
drive motors which rotate the entire bot. The key is in the
steering system that is completely micro processor controlled.
Vigilante will use onboard sensors feeding 4 micro processors
to perform controlled motor braking to steer the robot to the
intended target. In the combat robot sport this type of steering
is called Melty Brain. I am pretty sure the term was coined
by the owner of Blade Runner.
The first step in the design was to build a Microchip pic programmer.
This is something I had done in the past so felt that it should
be done rather quickly. I grabbed a few designs off of the internet
pulled out the bread board and tried them out. In all I actully
spent about 1 and a half weeks trying to get one working correctly.
The one pic programmer design that worked is called the Trivial
Pic Programmer. I modified the design slightly to make it a
little more robust. If you intend to build one of these programmers
I suggest contacting me and I can clue you into a few of the
tricks about it's design.
Well now that that is out of the way I had to build a cheapo
test platform. The test platform is just for developing the
many lines of code that run the system without having to spin
up a dangerous bot in the house. I have taken a couple of pieces
of thin plywood and mounted a lazy susan bearing between them.
This gives me a chance to prove out the electronics without
mounting them in a bot.
The first order of business is to get the wheel encoder working.
This is a non driven wheel that keeps track of the robots current
rotational position and speed. I completed and tested some of
this code tonight and it seems to be working very well.
I will post another update soon as I am working on the rate
gyroscope system and code now.
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