RFL Football Type Robot

I get robot ideas from other robots... Like, I was inspired by some guy's robotic dog, that I started out to build dogBot... That was a great experience and spanned an exposure to both the 14m and 18x picAxe chips along with an H-Bridge, actually, two of 'em (one per wheel.)

Sparkfun.com sells these, that's where I saw them first, then in YouTube videos... These things are cool, so I'll take a whack at makin' my own, from my junkbox!

I love the RFL, sometimes called the Robot Football League, but really the Robot Fighting League - Football...

The bots run upright, powered by wheels, and not held upright with fancy inertial guidance system.

From RFL Inspired ...

Well, my junkbox has a limited number of parts in it, so I had to create a kind of "junk parts available" kind of approach.

From RFL Inspired ...

Then came the problem with mounting the batteries...

When the thing took off, it would over-drive its own wheels, and fall over...
After some unsuccessful attempts at attaining balance, I discovered you need the batteries to distribute their weight directly on the motors to maximize power transfer to the bot wheels...

From RFL Inspired ...

Finally, after some rework we have some motor drive that looks like it will make it...

From RFL Inspired ...

Blog entry, we find out whether our scheme works as planned by putting some tires on this bot and doing something about those front wheels, they keep unscrewing, they are entirely wrong for this application, but they are what I have in the junk box...

From RFL Inspired ...

It's a robot project, so here's the video of the motor testing, with a lot of the failures removed :-)



Next Time We Get Some Nicer Wheels (Come on Mailman!!!)...

From RFL Inspired ...

One last item... And it's a tricky one: Where to mount the batteries in our junkbox version...

From RFL Inspired ...

Why not divide the pack in two using two X 2-AA battery holders??? This would make the design more compact, lower the center of gravity... Something like this...

From RFL Inspired ...

The two 9-volt battery clip holders get mounted as a pair, they rest on flanges from the twin motor gearbox, so make a holder out of plastic and Voila!

From RFL Inspired ...

Woo Hoo! It works... Now the bot is not top-heavy, this should make it more powerful... And, it does:

From RFL Inspired ...

Check out the modified football player bot now---



Now we've got power to wheels, stability, and oh boy! is this gonna be fun.

Let's hookup the motor drivers and picAxe 18 and see what we've got!