For this year’s project, we are attempting to build a material handling car to move our equipment and materials to the competition sites and manufacturing sites. Our cart design currently is aiming to move upwards of 400 pounds. We would like to have custom tank treads so we have better movement on different terrains, besides that we also wanted to have this type of drivetrain as none of our previous robots tried it. This would give our members an opportunity to learn and build something new! Thus far, we have a CAD design for an effective and cheap drivetrain, but we are planning on making additional changes to the drivetrain to make it better. Controls wise, we are looking to use a Raspberry Pi to control our robot. The frame will be made from steel to handle the heavy loads. The frame itself will be designed in a way to contain electronics, and batteries so as to prevent dust or water to cause damage to the electronics. The cart will have a flat modular surface on which handles and other elements could be added to move different shaped materials without them having to fall off the cart.
This semester’s progress has been good given that all team meetings were held online. Our team has a shared repository in which we update CAD files as well as any code we need for controls. We submitted a budget proposal for basic electronics, metal, and controllers. Next semester, we will finish up the CAD and start manufacturing the cart. We will also start working with the electronics and test out navigation ideas we had!
Here are a few of our CAD models!
