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Background
Background
One of the large parts of this project is getting the whole thing moving. I first was planning to do a tank track design, but I thought that would be a lot of small pieces to be printing, assembling, and could easily break. I decided to go with a threaded tank design that was used in amphibious machines shown to the left. This design choice was largely inspired based on the visual appearance and attraction to watching it move. It is not necessarily more efficient or "better" than tank tracks.
Tank Design
Tank Design
The design of this tank was easily the longest single model that we worked on excluding our total assembly of the Groomba. We did not have any requirements of this tank that were concrete because we do not know what kind of snow we will be in when we turn these. Our conditions would always be changing. We decided that we wanted to make sure we an aggressive enough thread on the tank
The whole tank was too big to print in one go, so we had to split it in half and make a sleeve to hold it all together and glue the two halves. On the left is a video of one of the tanks glued together.
Integrated Control System
Integrated Control System
The control system on the left is the summarized control system of how these tanks are controlled. The target velocity is what our control system tries to always get to, and it is being defined by the navigation and obstacle avoidance. If there are no obstacles and the Groomba is on course, then both the target velocities are the same and the Groomba happily goes straight. If the Groomba senses an obstacle or is off-track, the target velocities would adjust to either turn left or right, and adjust the signal to the motors. This change would be seen from the encoders on the feedback which counts the number of rotations the tank has done. This code is included on the Obstacle Avoidance page.
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