This is my antweight robot. I will explain in this page how we made it and what we used.
This is an overview of the Robot, it doesn't have a name yet but I am open to suggestions and you can email them to me at backyardcontraptions@googlemail.com, the subject of your message should be Tom: Robot.
You can pretty much see everything through the polycarb armour but I will explain what everything is in greater detail later on on the page.
As you can see from the picture, the front scoop is made from 1mm (thick) stainless steel. This was actually one of the last things that we put on.
It was quite difficult to make because I had to bend it in a vice with a hammer to the right angle and then shear off the segment for the axe to come down.
This was difficult because stainless steel is quite tough. We attatched it on with insulation tape which would be a major weakness if it was a fighting root.
The "Ground-Clearance" runner is so (as you might have guessed) the robot clears the ground enought to run properly, this is just made from a strip of rolled
kitchen roll and parcel tape.
This is a side view of the Antweight. You can see, protruding from the top of the robot is the axe. It is made from 1mm copper sheet leftovers which I bashed together to form a crude axe.
The axe is lacking power a lot, because it is only powered by an un-modified servo it has no sort of speed or much power at all, although if I catch it on something higher than the robot,
it will lift the front of it off the ground. The other thing sticking out of the top is the charging plug. It is very useful to have it sticking out as I now don't have to take the thing
apart to charge it.
The wheels are made from 6mm polycarbonate. Pete (Danny's grandad, an engineer) turned them for us in his lathe, isn't he kind! And i have put elastic bands on as tires to increase traction.
The two wheels are also attatched to servos.
The top plate, sides and back are made from 2mm polycarb from the display window of a drill case. It can be quite a resistant material when you need it to be and is quite good for robots such as this one,
plus it allows you to see what is going on inside.
You can see between the wheels are two servos. These servos have been modified by Pete to allow them to turn all the way round where as ordinary servos only turn through around 90 degrees.
Just underneath the axe and infront of the servos is another little black box, this is the receiver. The receiver picks up the signal from the controller and passes it down the wires to anything that is plugged
into it.
This is the back of the antweight. The blue thing is the battery pack, it is a 4.5 volt ni-cad (nickel-cadmium) rechargable battery pack. Originally it was just the receiver battery but it has plenty of power
to power the 3 extra servos as well as its self.
The copper brackets were done by me. Firstly, I cut off a strip of copper and cut it down the middle, then I folded it in half down the vertical cut, after that I folded both sides down one on top of the other
to make a corner. The bottom two brackets are held in by small bolts and nuts, the top two are only held with bolts because it was too difficult to screw a nut on.
After we made the outer shell, Danny stuck everything down and wired it up, we then fitted all the bits together and we were good to go (from my descriptions it sounds as if Danny did nothing and that couldn't be further from the truth. All the way he was helping me and took an equal role in building the robot.
All in all it took us around 5-6 hours to completely build this robot (with adequate cake breaks of course)). Below is a video of the completed robot running.
