Servo - August 2011

www.servomagazine.com/index.php?/magazine/article/august2011_MrRoboto

There are now robot hobbyist companies that do supply just that. Some of the ones that I know of are:

www.solarbotics.com www.pololu.com www.lynxmotion.com

Figure 6 shows my latest mini Sumo that is using a set of Solarbotics wheels/hubs mated with Pololu micro-metal gear motors. This setup rocks because I didn't have to find a machinist or hack something together! However, these are for small robots. If you need to put wheels on big motors for big robots, you'll need to go down another path. A great source of motors and wheel/hub combinations is www.banebots.com. These guys work with the Robot Wars style of big to really big machines that use electric motors and wheels to drive them. www.therobotmarketplace.com has large bore hubs and large wheels, however I didn't see any matched sets. You would have to mount the hubs to the wheels yourself which can be a dicey thing to do in your garage without precision tools and know-how.

These are the only companies that I know about. If you know of some that I didn't mention, email me at roboto@servomagazine.com to let me know.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention another source of powerful and ready-made robot wheel/hub/motor combinations: Robotis and RoboBuilder. These two companies make affordable Sumo-One style biped humanoid robot kits. Their motor combinations can be used either servo style where you tell them a position to go to, or motor style where you tell them the speed to run at. Both of these company's servos are daisy-chained, controlled by a serial link bus, and include torque measurement and position encoders. They are best used with smaller (under 10 pound) robots.

Figure 7 shows the Robotis Dynamixel motor/wheel set and Figure 8 is the RoboBuilder motor/wheel set. In the USA, the Robotis Bioloid kits can be found at www.trossenrobotics.com, www.robotshop.com, and www.roadnarrows.com. The RoboBuilder kits and supplies can also be found at www.roadnarrows.com and kits only can be found at www.robotshop.com.

These last two options are the most expensive of the smaller motor/wheel combinations. However, they are the most sophisticated of the sets that I've mentioned because they are motor, motor driver, motor controller, force feedback, and position encoders all rolled into one package. (Think really strong, hobby servo with feedback).

Figure 2. REALLY big servo disk as a wheel.

Q. I want to remotely control robots, RC cars, servos, etc., over the Web. How is this done? Are you familiar with any company that sells the software and hardware that does this? I have come up with very little in my Web searches. Thanks.

— Ed

A. I have not been able to experiment with this much yet. It is on my radar, however, so I do know of some hardware and software programs that handle this task. In my research, I have found that the easiest way to accomplish this goal is to make the robot/device that you want to control be a web server with links to the hardware. In that way, you can use any browser to connect to the robot to send commands and get feedback.