The CTRL-S robot chassis design is completely based on an old robot designed at LSBU ten years ago: CROCELLS, which is a wirelessly controlled wall climbing robot designed to look for weld defects in tall steel structures. The most interesting feature it has is its hinged structure, which enables the transition from angled surfaces onto vertical surfaces.
We took this chassis idea and imagined that after an earthquake, a reinforced concrete inspection robot able to do plane transitions to move freely from the floor to the walls and to the ceiling, will be definitely needed.
CTRL-S Robot Structure
The CTRL-S robot is designed to have two sections connected by a hinge joint. The first section (front) will carry all the electronics and motors and the second (back) section will carry the batteries.
The robot drive is differential with two servomechanisms driving two wheels. Two omni-wheels at the front and rear of the robot aide to stabilise the platform and enable the robot to be rotated at the same spot both clockwise and anticlockwise through a full 360 degree turn.
A real reinforced concrete climbing robot uses permanent magnets (under each segment) to stick to the embedded rebars. In the design without the hinged (see first picture below) structure, when the robot transfer from one plane to another at the corner, the air-gap increases too much so that the magnet force is too low to support the robot.
With the hinged design, when the front half of magnet is lifted up, the back half, still remains strong holding force. When the driving wheels reach the corner, the front magnets resume strong holding force, then the back magnet is lifted up to complete the transfer.
Hopefully, this design will help to cope with the slope on the Lava Palaver challenge.
Note: On the real robot, magnets were used to be able to climb on reinforce concrete structures. As the Pi Wars robot do not need this feature, we will not be using magnets either avoiding the danger.
CTRL-S Robot 