We had 3 preliminary ideas for the robot chassis and drivetrain. Figures representing these ideas are located below.
After careful deliberation, our group finalized a preliminary design for our final robot as the first figure shown above. Our final design consisted of a rectangular chassis, 4 wheels with back powered wheels, and a rotating arm to complete the different tasks. A SolidWorks model for the initially planned final design can be seen below.
Our original design relied heavily on RPS to navigate through the course. During Exploration 2, RPS proved to be an unreliable tool to use for complete navigation. Therefore, shaft encoding was incorporated as the main source of navigation while RPS was maintained in the code for potential use if absolutely needed.
Another major change applied to the final design was incorporating angled brackets to hold the arm to the servo motor. We originally used hot glue to connect the two pieces which was not feasible for such a heavy connection.