More pictures
Our first robot had a gear ratio of 45:1 and as you can see was rather simple.
It was made primarily to complete a few assignments. Our final robot is
similar to this one, but much bigger, and a lot stronger.
(We even won an award for having such a strong structure: Most likely to survive the drop test)
After some painful nights spent trying to get our test robot to seek out a target using coordinates, we had to
get to work on building a beta for the competition. We kept the basic platform we had for the Handyboard from the
test robot and set to work building better sides. Here's an early picture of a side of our robot. Most of the side
was only 2 FLUs wide, but what's not too visible in this picture near the top is a section about 4 FLUs wide to connect
to the main platform. The axles for the back wheels also fit into the sides. The robot uses a differential drive
system for movement, with 2 wheels in the front for support (They don't steer at all). One interesting thing we did do
with the front wheels, however, was use plastic white wheels with foam tape around them (sticky side out and still
covered, of course). This was a slight help to us with turns, although, as was seen in the contest, we ran into other
issues with turning later on.