Robot Chassis Design Project

A professor in my department asked me to help him out by designing a 3D printable robot chassis, for him to use in one of his upper level robotics classes. The premise of the design is that it needs to house specific components in a certain orientation, be easily printable and reproducible, and "look cool". Since the project is currently ongoing, we are close to the end of the major design revision phase, and will move into fine tuning of component placement soon. 

The pictures above show my most recent assemblies for this, which combine the bigger main components that I designed, and placeholder components that I either modeled or found pre existing models for. I am using Fusion 360 as CAD software for this project. 

 On the left you can see how I broke up the pieces of the chassis shell. I decided to do this because it was difficult to get a clean print when I left the entire shell intact. The entire shell also did not fit on the build plate of our cleanest printing printers, and keeping the entire shell together used a lot more support material. While breaking the shell and chassis both into components was slightly complicated in the CAD, that design choice makes manufacturing significantly easier and repeatable in a wider range of situations. On the right you can see a picture of us discussing component placement. 

 The most completed design is shown above. While inevitable tweaks will need to be made as we start mounting components, the printability problem has been solved, the tolerance on all hinges and latches is correct, and infrastructure for mounting holes has been added to the CAD in a way that can be edited later for easy revisions. I'm excited to see the finished product in a few months!