Silver Sumo - Revision I

After finishing the original IgORE kit, I felt that the mechanical design that the kit gave was lacking compared to some of the more competitive mini-sumo bots that have won competitions in the past. There are a few main ideas that I wanted to address with the original kits design:

• The battery pack being so high made the Center of Gravity too high, thus the robot was very tippy
• The wheels were good, but I wanted to get more traction, so I just wanted to double up the o-rings on each drive wheel
• I also thought that a robot with something closer to tank treads than wheels would be Uber-Neat!!
• The weight of the other design wasn't even near the 500 gram limit imposed by the mini-sumo rules.

So, all of this got me thinking, and I ended up redesigning the IgORE kit, and I present Silver Sumo - Revision I

The front plate is connected only to the top of the motors by four nylon screws. This wasn't a good setup. When another sumo robot pushed against the front plate it pinched the o-rings thus stopping the treads from rotating. 

I opted for a 'motor on top' design. This would allow me to place the battery pack under the robot, greatly lowering the center of gravity. The base is made out of  1mm thick aluminum.

Here you can see the initial battery pack that was used to power the robot. 4 AA cell batteries was definitely not enough juice for this robot.

As you can see, most of the robot is covered by the front plate, but no sensors were added to this design.

I had tried to start mounting the ground IR sensors on the bottom of the plate, and a bump sensor. But before I added the sharp IR proximity sensor, I decided that I would have needed a different  design to address the front plate/wheel pinching problem.

Plus, as you can see here, it looked a little boxy. Kind of like a Volvo... and we defiantly can not have any robots running around looking like Volvos! =)