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Goal

Create a production-ready high-speed mobile robot for university researchers.

Prior State of the Art

Traditional research robots have had a few major limitations First, they have a limited top speed, normally about one meter/second In the past this has not been a serious limitation because localization and mapping software has been the bottleneck Second, battery life has been limited and battery charging is an 8+ hour procedure This severely limits researchers’ productivity when working with the robots Additionally, robots have been just mobility platforms and have not been designed around the common sensors used This leads to large and unattractive external mounting of SICK laser range finders.

Solution

We decided to design a robot around a SICK laser range finder for aesthetic and practical reasons This decision allowed larger-than-normal motors to be mounted vertically inside the robot; the normal horizontal mounting would have increased the diameter of the robot significantly The one tradeoff we allowed was limiting payload capacity to 10 kilograms, a little lighter than the capacity of most research robots But this payload limit was large enough for our first customers’ application: a turret that housed an aim-able paint ball gun, dual CO2 tanks, ammunition hopper, and hit-detection panels We designed, fabricated, and assembled this custom turret.

We solved the power problems of past robots by using high-capacity lithium ion batteries and a custom built internal high speed charger This system allows researchers to operate the robots continuously for over 6 hours (depending on movement duty cycle), plug the robot into external power, and swap out the battery pack with a fresh one - all without interrupting power to the internal computer The other mode of operation is internal battery charging, which occurs in 3 hours.

Challenges

We were developing all of the mechanical, structural, and electrical systems of a production-ready mobile robot from scratch.