Roboticist here, love all the work he does, its truly astounding. His 3D printed parts are incredible and his belief in their structural integrity is wonderful, far more faith than me. He has some...
Roboticist here, love all the work he does, its truly astounding. His 3D printed parts are incredible and his belief in their structural integrity is wonderful, far more faith than me. He has some really interesting stuff that I would never think about, such as the twisted belt system without an intermediary for conversion.
But, I will say, not a fan of his overall designs on these projects. I don't think they allow for enough precision, and are certainly not a design that would work in a 'real-world' application. Creating a large planetary gearbox where each 'node' or wheel is always in activation is a waste of energy, and introduces damaging the internals due to torque, banding issues, and regular-old jams of the world.
You could 'accomplish' the "same...ish" idea, with a single perpendicular wheelthing (can't remember what he calls them) that are always in contact with the ground, with the ends on a rotational motor.
! -- forward/back -- !
v v
[|x|x|x|]<============>[|x|x|x|]
^^^^^
| the perpendicular motorized wheel... thing
This would decrease a lot of the problems he has on this sort of design, his control calculations with the PIDs would be simpler, and better mapped to a more nominal linear system. I've never really seen that built, but it should work better and still fit within his hard (understandable) two motor requirement.
....brb, gotta go build something...
Still, super cool, especially with the development, which is more the point - trying these things.
Yeah, I don't think James cares all that much about precision, real-world applications, or device longevity, otherwise he wouldn't be working on such impractical designs to begin with. I suspect...
Yeah, I don't think James cares all that much about precision, real-world applications, or device longevity, otherwise he wouldn't be working on such impractical designs to begin with. I suspect he's just having fun problem solving and creating weird robots. And sure, he occasionally has to account for weird idiosyncrasies in his design because of his sub-optimal choices, like the sideways movement speed varying due to the inner wheel being in more/less contact with the ground at certain points, but that just means another problem he can have fun solving. :P
Roboticist here, love all the work he does, its truly astounding. His 3D printed parts are incredible and his belief in their structural integrity is wonderful, far more faith than me. He has some really interesting stuff that I would never think about, such as the twisted belt system without an intermediary for conversion.
But, I will say, not a fan of his overall designs on these projects. I don't think they allow for enough precision, and are certainly not a design that would work in a 'real-world' application. Creating a large planetary gearbox where each 'node' or wheel is always in activation is a waste of energy, and introduces damaging the internals due to torque, banding issues, and regular-old jams of the world.
You could 'accomplish' the "same...ish" idea, with a single perpendicular wheelthing (can't remember what he calls them) that are always in contact with the ground, with the ends on a rotational motor.
This would decrease a lot of the problems he has on this sort of design, his control calculations with the PIDs would be simpler, and better mapped to a more nominal linear system. I've never really seen that built, but it should work better and still fit within his hard (understandable) two motor requirement.
....brb, gotta go build something...
Still, super cool, especially with the development, which is more the point - trying these things.
Yeah, I don't think James cares all that much about precision, real-world applications, or device longevity, otherwise he wouldn't be working on such impractical designs to begin with. I suspect he's just having fun problem solving and creating weird robots. And sure, he occasionally has to account for weird idiosyncrasies in his design because of his sub-optimal choices, like the sideways movement speed varying due to the inner wheel being in more/less contact with the ground at certain points, but that just means another problem he can have fun solving. :P