Stabilizing Our Driving Base

By Jayesh, Omar, Max, and Darshan

Task: Stablize Meccanum wheel base so the driving is more stable and consistent

Our Meccanum wheel base idea started off on a shaky note. While we had a good amount of success in the tass we wanted to complete, like driving right or let without turning the entire robot, including the basic driving functions. However, as we went on with testing, we found that over time, the force the meccanum wheels were exerting on the chain was actually causing the motors driving the chains to come inwards. This was thereby loosening the chain and weakening their effect on the driving chassis. To fix this, we decided to mount angled beams between the motor and Meccanum wheels to stabilize and prevent the motion. We then further strengthened the system by 3D printing trapezoid-shaped mounts that have more surface area and strength to stabilize the system.

Reflections

As we go on improving the robot, we keep finding that our new designs have an incredible amount of errors and small bugs that need to be looked at before moving on to the next big design. Now that we have a stable and relatively reliable driving base, we can now focus our attentions to the scoring mechanism. Through our redesigns of the motor stabalizers we have found the use of testing on both the ground and in stationary conditions. We need to design a new mount to make stationary testing more efficient. This will especially be important for the testing we'll have to commit to for our scoring mechanism. (which will be discussed in a future post)