Sounds like a great father-son project.
I would love to have something like that to inspect the crawlspace under my house with, to check for leaks and puddles. The genius that installed the hvac ducts 20+ years before I arrived ran a main duct directly across the crawlspace entrance, covering about the top 12 inches of a 22-24 inch high opening, so getting in and out is very annoying (especially since I'm not as thin as I was a few decades ago when I was a pre-teen :-)). The floor is gravel that is fairly smooth, covered with a couple of layers of polyethylene as a vapor barrier, so I don't think tracks would be required but the wheels would need to be several inches in diameter and the overall height less than 12" for easy entrance. Would also need headlights, and a flat shelf for cargo would be nice so you could use it to bring someone that wrench or screwdriver or sump pump they forgot to take under with them. You could even add a cargo trailer for those big loads or XL battery packs if you need to explore all night before returning to base for a charge. Just a suggestion for another market if you try to sell these. Heck, I'd pay as much as $19.95 for one, maybe even a bit more :-).
Regards, Carl Ijames carl.ijames aat deletethis verizon dott net
The robot that I made with my son, that works like a tracked skid steer, turned out to be really good. I have no idea how we will end up at the state level olympiad, but it is a good workable robot, like a real skid steer, a machine for getting work done.
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Following this, and realizing that motion and electronic components are very cheap and good nowadays, I decided to make a surveillance robot.
It will be mounted on a wheeled or tracked platform (off the shelf), have a Raspberry Pi 2 linux computer, it will connect to wifi and carry a camera. The use for it would be to be remotely controlled and explore my warehouse, so that I can tell it to go where I want, from home, and I will be able to see the webcam stream from the robot.
I do not think that it will be particularly difficult to implement. This is something that I always wanted to have, like "how is that pile of copper pipes doing in that corner" or "are there any puddles on the ground in this corner".
I do have cameras, about 8 by now, but they cannot cover everything.
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