Woodi

Woodi
Year Of Creation	2016-2017
Versions
Latest Revision	Woodi
Revision Years	n/a-n/a
Information and Statistics
Farthest Distance	n/a
Fastest Time	n/a
Highest Finish AutoNav	n/a
Highest Finish Design	n/a
← Jaymi Jessi →

Woodi was a replacement robot, meant to take the place of Jaymi at the 2017 competition. It was a last ditch effort to bring a robot to competition that year. We started laying down the design approximately 15 hours before leaving for competition. After a couple trips to Home Depot, the effort of a few members who were not driving the next day produced the robot you see here. Despite it's sloppy appearance, Woodi was a good testing platform during the 2017-2018 year and served as a design inspiration for Jessi.

Competitions

IGVC 2017

• Results
  • Distance:
  • Design Competition Placement:
  • AutoNav Competition Placement:

Versions

Woodi

At Competition

Woodi was never able to qualify or compete. Software and electrical issues were persistent throughout competition, which prevent it from ever being in a usable state. The main issues are documented down below.

Mechanical Design & Issues

Woodi was designed to be a minimal working robot. It consisted of 3 main sections: the mast, the electrical box, and the "chassis". The mast was simply the mast originally made for Jaymi, reattached to the electrical box. The electrical box was a simple wooden box. The sides of the box were removable panels with the RoboJackets logo on the side. Half of the top was on a hinge which allowed it to be opened to access the electronics. The back was also on a hinge so the batteries could be put in. The electronics themselves were mounted to a plastic sheet that was the initial electronics board for Jaymi, which sat unmounted in the box. The "chassis" was a jumble of 2x4 wood which held the motors and custom gear boxes. We reused the wheels and the custom caster assembly from ___.

Unfortunately, Woodi had a high center of mass (see WoodiTipping.mp4) due to the batteries being so high off the ground. This made Woodi very prone to tipping backwards when initially accelerating. The caster was also poorly designed (the wheel was not offset from the center of rotation enough) which made it hard to turn. The uneven ground at competition combined with the bad caster caused the robot to fall forward once, which damaged the SICK LiDAR mounted on the front. At competition, we added a wheelie in the back to prevent the robot from tipping too far back.

One of the main issues mechanically with Woodi was the custom gearboxes. These were originally part of the design for Jaymi and had to be used on Woodi as there were no alternatives. The gearboxes had many issues with design, tolerances, and manufacturing, but those are detailed in Jaymi#Mechanical_Design_.26_Issues. The main issue we encountered with Woodi was the motors were not powerful enough. Woodi moved fairly slowly, even at full speed, partially due to the motors themselves and partially due to the amount of friction generated in the gear box. Woodi would always produce high pitch whining sound with the old motors and gearbox. The motors were replaced with wheelchair motors that had built-in gearboxes (as seen on Jessi) during the 2017-2018 year for testing before Woodi was finally dismantled and deprecated.