Final Touches

Since we have completed our robot and we are satisfied with our gear ratio we must now make sure that it follows the rules. We found that our robot follows all of the rules except for having the drive wheel hideden from plain view. Therefore, we extended beams from in between the tank tread we have on the robot and made a structure off of that, extending to the right and covering the drive wheel from plain view. Now our robot follows all of the rules specified by Mr.Wirght and all that is left to do is compete and hopefully win.

This is our robot with the structure surrounding the drive wheel.

The Golden Ratio

We have finally finished our gear train and the robot which gives the gear train support and actually allows the gear train to perform the function of moving the robot. Also, since one of the rules is that all members of the group must know the gear ratio before competing in the "race" we have taken the time to claculate the gear ratio of our robot. We started by finding out the ratio for a worm gear box which is 1:24. Next, we used what I found about calculating complex gear ratios to find our gear ratio. i found that to find out a complex gear ratio you can multiply its parts. So for our gear ratio we have 3 worm gear boxes: 3 1:24 gear ratios and one 1:25 gear ratio which means we must multiply 24, 24, 24, and 25 which equals 345,600. Therefore, our gear ratio is 1:345,600 and our robot will take days to move the 0.5 meter "race" distance.

Re-Plan... Rebuild

We have decided to destroy our robot and rebuild it because it wasn't very robust and it would be difficult to attach the RCX brick and a drive wheel. We now have a gear train composed of 3 worm gears and a 1:25 spur geartrain. Also, we plan to attach gears on the last worm gear box and attatch them to the drive wheel. We have now attatched a tank tread on one side of the robot and a wheel on the other, which fullfills the requirement of having 3 or less tires on your robot.