Our Robot Design

Our robots, Opportunity and Curiosity, are relatively agile and boxy. Each robot uses two drive motors in the front and two caster ball wheels in the back. They both have 4 motorized attachment points which are controlled by two motors.  We have 3 sensors on them, 2 color sensors and a gyroscope.

Our Boxy Design:

We built both of our robots to be boxy so that we could easily bump against the wall to align the robot and to keep the wires inside the robot where it won't interfere with our missions. Sometimes (especially when the robot is carrying heavy attachments) our robot will constantly go at an angle despite the corrections in our program. When this happens we use our boxy outer panel to back up against the wall to make sure that we are going straight again. Before we had this design we also had another problem with our wires getting in the way of our missions. This boxy design helps ensure that these wires stay inside the robot.

1 motor=3 motor attachment places

When designing our robot, we soon realized that it would be hard to get more than 2 motorized attachment locations. We then thought about how we could make two motors control more than 2 motorized attachment points. One idea came up during this discussion and we all decided to implement this. The idea was that with our front task motor, we could first use a gear train system to power two motorized attachment points on each side of our robot. Then we could use a bevel gear to change the axis of rotation allowing the same motor to power another motorized attachment point in the front of the robot. This allows us to produce three attachment points using only 1 motor.

Two Caster Ball Wheels

Our robot uses two caster ball wheels instead of one. The reason for this is for better balance when we turn. When ever we would stop after a turn, because we only had on caster ball wheel to support the back of the robot, it would tip. Therefore we added another caster ball wheel to make sure that this does not happen.

Our Sensors

We have three total sensors, 2 color sensors and a gyroscope. We keep both of our color sensors before of our wheels so that when we scan a line and stop when moving forwards, our wheels are behind the line. We use the gyro to correct the angle of our robot when we go forwards.