Design changes
Wheel stabiliser
After some long and careful consideration, I decided to use a wheel stabiliser to stabilise my robot when tackling the obstacle course. Initially, my preference was to not use a stabilising mechanism, because I thought my robot was balancing quite well on its own when the balancing code was included in the software. Also, I could not really find anything around my house that sprung to the top of my mind which I could use as a stabilizer. So, my plan was to code the robot to balance itself when trying to manoeuvre it’s way through the obstacle course. However, coding the robot to get through the obstacle course and to balance itself at the same time was trickier than I imagined, so I performed a full U-turn and decided a stabiliser was probably the best thing to do all along. So off I set to the local Woodies DIY.
I was able to pick up a single wheel for €14.99. I measured the height of the wheel device (metal plate included) to be 67cm, and I measured the distance from the ground to the bottom of the foothold on the robot to be 65cm. This meant that when the robot was moving with the stabilizer attached it was leaning slightly backwards. This wasn’t a problem, unless the robot travelled at a high speed it sometimes would topple over backwards. To prevent this, I set the speed of the robot to be a bit slower just to be safe.
Attaching and removing the stabiliser wheel was very simple. To attach it initially, I tied 2 elastic bands to the foothold on the robot and the metal plate, and then wrapped them around a few times until the wheel was in a secure position.
Ping-pong ball collector
I also needed to add a device to collect the ping pong balls when fired. This was again very simple, I just cut out the bottom of a 510g cereal box and taped it to the top of the robot using some double-sided tape. The final design can be seen below.
