The chassis

I wanted Takbot to be able to make 360° turns at a spot. This makes programming the movements simple and intuitive, apart from helping to maintain position and determine orientation using a simple wheel encoder. For this I chose a tank-type chassis, mainly cause it would run over things with great fury and awesomeness - if it should decide so. :)

After a lot of digging online, I decided to make my own using the Tamiya track and wheel kit from Superdroid robots. This is cheaper and apparently has more traction than the Tamiya's plastic track set . I used a couple of Tamiya's universal plate sets to make a chassis wide enough to accommodate my huge ATmega128 board (I made this one back when i didn't have the tools for SMD soldering).

Here's what it looks like:

Takbot - The big picture

I am building my third robot - Takbot, which will be able to map and navigate a room.

Here's what i have in mind - Takbot will have an IR range sensor mounted on a servo. It will be controlled by the PC via an RF modem. The sensors and actuators on Takbot will be handled by an ATmega128 board.

In my following posts, I'll talk about each part and why i choose them for my bot.

"And here... we... go!"

I thought "The Dark Knight" was brilliant and i'll buy the dvd soon!

I'll be sharing my experience and stuff related to my projects. Feel free to comment or post questions. You may also mail me for info about my source code or schematics.