Subject:
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Re: How much weight can a LEGO chassis carry around?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Fri, 9 Dec 2005 15:35:33 GMT
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Viewed:
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1390 times
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In lugnet.robotics, steve sjbaker1@airmail.net wrote:
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Yeah - but you can add more axles and more wheels so that the load is
shared across more axles. That keeps the distance between the
axles small which helps out with chassis stiffness issues too - and
since you’ll probably want more than two motors to drive the behemoth,
it won’t hurt to have more driven wheels either.
If you think of just a bunch of wheels in a long line though, you’ll
find that steering gets a bit problematic because with that many wheels,
you are more or less forced into skid-steering - which gets
progressively harder the more wheels you have.
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Right, at least with differential steering. I’ve been thinking that perhaps I
would be better off with Ackerman steering (like a car). And while I’m at it, I
wonder whether I might have the back wheels turn as well as the front wheels --
four-wheel steering? That could give me a pretty tight turn radius (though it
still wouldn’t quite turn in place). And if I also have all four wheels
motorized, then perhaps it would be enough power too.
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Also, you can’t easily widen the platform without it starting to sag in the
middle - you could add a center row of wheels - but that would just make
skid-steering even harder.
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Hmm, that’s true. My laptop is about 12 inches wide, maybe a little more. And
I do want the screen to face front, so my bot needs to be at least that wide.
Typical bridge-building techniques, like tension elements hanging down from
towers above the wheels, would only work on the sides; I couldn’t support the
middle that way.
Still, I could put some casters in the middle to aid support. If a regular
caster disrupts steering too much, I could even get a ball-bearing caster
(non-LEGO if necessary... off the top of my head, I can’t think of LEGO elements
that would work for that).
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The answer would be to build a Synchro platform. You can just keep
bolting on more wheel modules and more motors to make something as
big as you like - if you double the number of wheels, motors, and
axles, you double the carrying capacity. I don’t see any particular
limit to the size you could make that.
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That’s an interesting idea. A rather complex, expensive solution, but it does
look like it would work!
Thanks,
- Joe
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: How much weight can a LEGO chassis carry around?
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| (...) Yeah - but you can add more axles and more wheels so that the load is shared across more axles. That keeps the distance between the axles small which helps out with chassis stiffness issues too - and since you'll probably want more than two (...) (19 years ago, 9-Dec-05, to lugnet.robotics)
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