Initial Design Research

The first stage of research was to look at some other robot designs on the Internet. The first was a line following buggy whose chassis was made from a sandwich box. This robot is shown and referenced below.


www.arrickrobotics.com/robomenu/sandwich.html

This robot seemed simple and easy to make. The advantages of a robot such as this would be that the box could be opened easily for maintenance, and that it could be easily decorated. The box I decided to consider if we were to choose a design such as this was an ice-cream tub of the approximate type shown below.



With farther thought however, this design did not seem challenging enough and so I continued researching robot designs. The next potential design considered was a stacked layer robot such as the two below.




www.robotroom.com/Repairs.html

I did consider using a construction toy such as Lego or Meccano, though this seemed too simple for the purposes of this project. The most impressive design I found was of a robot made from multiple plastic components bolted together. The particular robot shown below is the Microbric Viper, though we would of course design our own.




www.microbric.com/page.php?sId=19

The design I will be focusing on will be made from multiple plastic sections. The sections will be cut to fit and stacked, with the circuits and other components sandwiched in layers. I believe this will create the most impressive robot, though it may be impractically complex to build. This design will have two caster wheels, one at the front and one at the back, and will have its drive wheels on the sides in the middle of the robot. Concept drawings of this design will be posted here soon.