MaATS - Modular and Autonomous Terrain System

I have started to re-design my rocker-bogie leg system.
(this devlog is shorter than the last one.. i promise)

This time around I decided to actually take some inspiration from robots that were successful - the most obvious case here being the Perseverance rover.

The rocker-bogie system is quite a general use-case for all rovers like this, but the way I chose to redesign mine is thinner, relies on specific rotational points and covers a wider area below the base while keeping the centre of mass lower.
This is taken from the perseverance design.

If you have any suggestions, as always they are more than welcome, and thanks for reading! :)

TO NOTE (don’t bother reading unless you are rating my project)

I am aware that by taking some fairly heavy inspiration I lose points on uniqueness, but this part of the design caused quite a mental roadblock for me and I stopped working on the project for a few weeks because of it. Considering how wide-spread this mechanism generally is, I feel it was a reasonable design choice to take inspiration and ensure that the leg linkage will function as expected so I can focus on the parts of my project that will be unique.

Actuator design!

So its been a while, I’ve spend a fair bit of time attempting to understand ROS2 and Isaacsim and I’m at a point now where I’m pretty happy with the basics.
I moved on to working on the actuator design, which is thankfully not too complex as the stepper motors do most of the heavy lifting already - the gearbox itself is only 5:1!

Some difficult things I didn’t expect to encounter:

-Gearboxes are harder to design than I thought! I’d always just bought them online, but I was surprised in the amount of options I had. Eventually, I settled on a planetary gearbox with herringbone helical gears.

-I had to learn a few new terms for gear information and what they did which was quite foreign initially

-Worst of all I discovered the hard way that herringbone gears do not interlock the same nice way that spur gears did in my initial design, so I included a way for the actuator to be halved and reattached so the gears could be re-added.

I have included some final renders, as well as a video comparison of the spur gears vs helical herringbone ones :)

THANK YOU FOR READING!!!

p.s. please please feel free to give feedback, a lot of this is very new stuff to me design wise so I really don’t know what I’m doing a lot of the time, esp. knowing if the parts will hold under load

Over the last few days I’ve began work on the rover legs. These are rocker-bogie legs(the same ones as mars rovers use), or at least my take on them. I am more than happy for any suggestions by the way, design is not really my forte in this project so this is relatively new to me.
The metal parts are extruded t slot aluminium which are very cheap, and the shape makes adding connectors really simple. Those white sections will be the 3d printed connectors which I’m hoping shouldn’t weigh too much and will be pretty strong.

Again, any suggestions are really appreciated as without being able to test irl this as I’m used to while designing, I’m kind of just shooting in the dark with leg lengths, connector designs, etc.

Thanks for reading!!
Either wheel design or finally some electronics to come next, expect PCBs and not just arduinos and jumper wires like my last few projects…

Deciding on the project specifics

For some background, I want to go into space robotics and there are a few things that seem to poke out to me software wise that I should be looking at.
So with that in mind, I began looking at what I wanted the project to be.
I knew it had to:
-Use C++
-Incorporate ROS2
-Incorporate some form of ML (maybe with isaacsim/lab)
-Be related to space

My very first idea was an arm to grab moving projectiles, I could use a bit of CV here as well as ml, and it would be quite related to something along the lines of the canadarm.

However, it wasnt COOL enough.
So, I looked into rovers, and long story short I decided I am going to make a rover that can:
-Do its own locomotion via a local ml model
-Can send wifi signals on its own channel to my laptop
-Does its own scanning of the area with a 2d spinning lidar
-Picks up dirt from the ground

So, how is it unique?? The big question..
I had the idea of making it modular. So, the same robot can be sent on different missions, just by adding a different module. I’m not sure how yet, but maybe a module for scanning the dirt for its molecular makeup, a robot arm of its own, a special ml model for a certain type of terrain, etc

If you got here and you are reading this in the future, thank you. I appreciate this was a wall of text, but I wanted to give some background on the project so the direction I am going is clear when reading it after its complete.
Added a sketch of the rover(but its a bit difficult to get the vision, i’m a pretty terrible drawer)
Working on the legs next.