Dawn Robotics Forum

Hi all,
As the title says really. I recently got my Raspberry Pi camera robot and have been getting stuck into navigating using machine vision. Having got the vision routine working nicely I turned my attention to trying to get the robot to drive straight. Thinking it was simply the lack of wheel encoders I started entering fudge factors for the wheel speeds. After a while with little success I picked the robot up while it was running and realised there is some sort of clutch that allows the drive wheels to slip. Unfortunately the slip is so great that I now realise there must be a mechanical problem.

Anyone else had this trouble? Anyone got a fix for it?

The robot is brand new and has only ever run on hard floors and one very thin rug.

Cheers!

Hi Dave,

Welcome to the forum.

That's an interesting problem. I knew there was a clutch in the gearbox before, but I don't think that I've ever seen it slip. As I understand it, the clutch is there to protect the gears in the event of a motor stall caused by something like a crash.

How much force does it take to cause the clutch to slip? i.e. can you cause it to happen by holding the encoder shaft and turning the wheel by hand? Does the slipping happen on both gearboxes, or just one?

It might be worth opening up the gearbox to look at the clutch to see if it's broken somehow. Another thing that you could try for a quick fix is turning the motor over and attaching the wheel to the encoder shaft. Although obviously this is not really a great long term fix as you're liable to strip the gears if the robot crashes at speed.

Also, hope you don't mind but I'm going to move this thread to out general Technical Support forum, as this sub forum is intended for the Rover 5 based kit we sell. Although I should really set up a specific forum for the camera robot.

Regards

Alan