Inspired by John Arne's post, I got a Redcat Rockslide, which is totally cool and a great robotics platform. As you can see, it's really easy to add a mounting platform for electronics (that's APM with GPS and Xbee mounted above) and there's LOADS of room. You could even have it carry a laptop if you wanted. BTW, that's the 1/8 size Redcat shown above, which is $236. I think the 1/10 size Redcat would probably be just as good for most uses, and it's just $159. [Update: the 1:10 isn't big enough. See this comparison]
I've registered the ArduRover name, and am now just looking for the best starting point to modify the APM code for ground rovers. Since James Goppert is part of the APM dev team, we'll probably start with his rover code, which you can see at work here. But if others have code or sensor additions to the basic APM set that would be good to add to a rover, this is the place to discuss and share.
Ideally, we'll get this done in time for the Sparkfun AVC contest, on the hope that APM can have a decent chance of placing in all of the categories--ground, plane and quad. Which would be awesome.
Comments
I also ordered the cheaper 1:10 Rockslider to see if it was big enough. It isn't, I think, especially if you want to add other sensors and processor boards. Here's the 1:8 and 1:10 side-by-side, with the APM on my DIY electronics platform for scale (I'm sending the 1:10 back):
Well count me among the Rockslide 1:8 crawlers, I ordered from Amazon last night.
While my town is flat my kids are young so slow is probably better now as they'll want to drive it too.
Also I'm hoping that long wheelbase will be able to tackle my stairs inside the house so I can send it downstairs on autonomous errands :)
Here is a Traxxis Summit using an Ardupilot and integrated with FlightGear for hardware-in-the-loop simulation. I can't remember whether we were running it in high gear or low gear when it was driving outside:
I didn't think a UAV community would be interested in a hybrid so I've been working on it in my spare time, but it seems some people had been thinking along similar lines.
If anyone's interested in getting involved feel free to pm me, there's lots of interesting problems to solve and this 'could' make a nice addition to the range of toys that do stuff using batteries, motors and arduino's = )
And it looks like half my post went missing. Here's the other transitional visualizations from walking to flying.
Legs invert
Props released ready for flight
Comment by Robero Navoni on January 29, 2011 at 1:40pm
Dear Friends,
this rover need hybrid quad on it for jump the obstacle .. :)
This is my old idea ...
I agree. I thought about the benefits of a land vehicle at the start of last year and how certain navigational problems could be solved by adding the flight capability of a Quad. Hopping over irregular terrain being the biggest benefit, and is a Quad flying when it's walking? How does the law interpret something that hops?
So then it occurred to me that a flying Quad had a similar layout to a QuadBot. If you stretch all four legs of a QuadBot, from above it looks very similar to a QuadCopter frame - like this.
I then visualized a concept of a vehicle incorporating both, the walking capabilities of a QuadBot, and the flying capabilities of a QuadCopter. The image below is a composite of legs I already built as a proof of concept using AX-12's, and the ball shaped body (the top and bottom of the ball will be flat) similar to the SpiderBot design I viewed on youtube.
I haven't built the prop release mechanism yet due to time and work commitments, but the concept is pretty simple.
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