TrakBot a Track Driven Robot Base

Track robots are the coolest! They are also a kind of pain in the butt. Tracks keep falling off, the cheap ones get squalling gears that need a lot of grease. But they are worth it! There is nothing more fun than watching these tracked bases grind their way over obstacles...

So I had to build a track robot!

I started with the Tamiya Base unit - A little motor with switchable batteries that goes forward and backward. This was back when I was buying a collection of little simple bots to see how well they got around. It wasn't long until I wanted some smarts to the motion and I bought a microrobot wall follower. It had an IR detector so it didn't have to bang into things, and could zoom along, but only forward and it could only turn in one direction. But it could follow walls.

So I added the dual drive Tamiya for 10 bucks. Now I had a spare gear drive... I kludged on the IR detector from the microrobot and voila! Now my track drive got a life of it's own... I would call it TrakBot!



This was good! This was fun... But now I had seen the famous Parallax Stamp powered bots and they would run up to something and stop, make a decision or two, then move on. This called for brains!!!!

I ordered a picAxe m8, m14, and 18x... Hmmm... The 18 x running the TrakBot??? Seemed like a good idea. Here are the first test results...



Oh Boy! This was too fun! By now, a zillion other experiments had introduced me to the Sharp Distance Measuring Devices. One of these babies and the TrakBot could be pretty darn smart when it came to avoiding obstacles. Oh yeh, and there's the little matter of doing it all with an m8 picAxe and Motor driver. You can get all this on a pre-soldered board for less than $20 USD, so it's only logical. The results:



This is my funnest robot. I've got about $50 USD in it, but it has a lot of "think" power, and, it's a lot of fun. Here's the scoop on this bot in video form