HOVERBOT:
Wheels? We Don’t Need
Wheels Where We’re Going
By Paul Verhage
Robots go where you point them and make a dead stop when you command
them. Hovercraft, on the other hand, experience far less friction and that makes
controlling them conceptually different. Want to simulate a satellite in orbit? A
HoverBot lets you do that in two dimensions and in the comfort of your own
home. Plus, no flights on the “Vomit Comet” are necessary to test some of your
satellite control theories.
Over two years ago, I tried simulating a robotic spacecraft. The attempt involved using the air jets from an air hockey table to lift a Styrofoam sheet into a nearly frictionless state. I was going to have a robot controller and
propulsion system sitting on this floating sheet. The robotic
spacecraft’s propulsion would come from the same
compressed air and pneumatic valves some R/C airplanes
use to deploy their landing gear.
After discovering that toy air tables were incapable of
generating sufficient air flow, I put the idea on hold — but I
didn’t give up on someday making a hovering robotic
spacecraft. Recent Internet searches have uncovered model
hovercraft ideas that have inspired me to restart my
experiments. The result is the NearSys HoverBot that I’ll
describe in this and following articles.
Background on the
NearSys HoverBot
Hovercraft can travel without friction (or nearly so)
because they do away with a robot’s greatest source of
drag: spinning wheels and motors. Moving through the air
at low speed generates such a small amount of drag that a
hovercraft gradually slows down when no longer being
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