Not that I’ve spent much time with my KRZ01 robot. I feel almost bad that I haven’t let the project develop much before making some significant changes. Like that high school girlfriend with braces.
It’s just that my main project, the KR01 robot, is where I’ve been devoting most of my time and energy, and the KRZ01 isn’t frankly that different, despite being rather petite: about 1/4th the size and 6% of the weight (160g with its battery). Both are wheeled robots intended to operate using the Robot Operating System (ROS) I’m writing in Python.
So what made the KRZ01 the target of a redesign was the purchase of four Mecanum wheels. This post describes the beginning of this project — I’m only at the design stages right now.
What are Mecanum Wheels?
There’s a lot of descriptions (e.g., the YouTube video below) and demonstrations of Mecanum wheels on the web already (such as a Turkish Mecanum forklift!) so I won’t go into much detail here, suffice it to say that they allow a robot to travel in any direction without changing its compass heading. Well… not up or down. But crab travel, sure.
Just to mess with your head I’ll quote the description of how they work from the Wikipedia page on Mecanum wheels:
- Running all four wheels in the same direction at the same speed will result in a forward/backward movement, as the longitudinal force vectors add up but the tranverse vectors cancel each other out;
- Running (all at the same speed) both wheels on one side in one direction while the other side in the opposite direction, will result in a stationary rotation of the vehicle, as the transverse vectors cancel out but the longitudinal vectors couple to generate a torque around the central vertical axis of the vehicle;
- Running (all at the same speed) the diagonal wheels in one direction while the other diagnoal in the opposite direction will result in a sideway movement, as the transverse vectors add up but the longitudinal vectors cancel out.
That kind of talk totally does my head in, but the concept obviously works, so I’m on board. When I get to the point of programming the motor controller for this I’m sure I’ll need a couple shots of good bourbon to focus my mind appropriately to the task.
There are some design considerations regarding Mecanum wheels, and both David Anderson’s advice and my own experience with the KR01 suggest that I want the robot as balanced as possible, both in terms of weight and the position of the wheels relative to the center of the robot. With Mecanum wheels, weight distribution is even more critical than on a normal wheeled robot. Having too much weight on one wheel would significantly alter its behaviour, and not in a good way.
The Plans
So I have been planning this out. I can’t actually build anything just yet because I stupidly only bought two of the brass wheel hubs rather than four (“there were two in the photo” he says in his defense), so I’m waiting on another shipment from Canada.
Because it will be a fundamentally different robot the redesign will be called the KRZ02.
Update as of 2020-05-12: That first plan had a glaring error, in that while the centers of the wheels were on the circumference of a circle, that hardly meant they were equidistant, meaning their centers would fit on the four corners of a square. I’d drawn the diagram wrong. I tried a second time, this time also moving the motors as close towards the center of the robot as I dared, and including the positions of the Raspberry Pi Zero W, the two Picon Zero motor controllers, the Pimoroni Black Hat Hack3r expansion board, and the Breakout Garden Mini to hold one SPI and two I²C sensors . The robot got bigger but also more symmetrical. Witness version 2:
One thing seems pretty clear at the outset: the current KRZ01 has two “moon buggy” wheels and a ball caster, and its physical extent (i.e., how much space it takes up) is a circle 128mm in diameter — it’s a small robot. Plan 1 expands that to 210mm. Plan 2 above expands that extent to 227mm, almost double in size. It looks like it’d be a much larger robot than the KRZ01. Plan 1 used a 75mm chassis width, which is the current width of the KRZ01. Plan 2 has the motors as close together as seems reasonable but by fixing my design “bug” the robot is almost as big as David Anderson’s SR04 at 11″ (280mm). Not a small robot anymore.
I discussed the issue of symmetry with the guys at the DPRG and it seems that weight balance is critically more important than symmetry. I’m not happy with the Plan 2 being such a big robot, and from the plans there seems to be a fair bit of wasted space (i.e., it’s a lot longer than is strictly necessary) so I think I might try a third, shorter design.
More later…