Construction of SickSack

The mechanical concept of SickSack had been roughly outlined in the cardboard prototype:

SickSack cardboard prototype

Aluminum adventures

We just began creating an aluminum version of that prototype and dealt with the problems and design decisions along the way. The raw construction materials were 1.5 mm aluminum plate and 5 mm aluminum rod axes:

raw aluminum materials

A milling machine was used extensively to craft the servo mounting holes and the wheel slots:

milling aluminum plating

Slowly, but steadily, the aluminum plates began to take shape:

aluminum plating basic shaping

LEGO wheels were used, and the hinges were manually crafted from iron plate and riveted in place:

hinges and joints

There had to be a 6 mm offset from the servo horn to the next car. This was accomplished with plexiglas:

first car plexiglas offset

Quite some time later, the cars were completed and the snake head and tail designs were decided:

all sicksack wagons complete

Wiring

Connecting and mounting everything was much more time consuming than we had expected.

wiring sicksack

The initial design, with single wheels under the cars, turned out to be inadequate as the snake tipped over all the time. This was solved by prolonging the first, center and last wheel axes to have three wheels.

It was necessary to add a skirt at the head to block the high intensity RoboCup scene lightning from saturating the photo transistors. Thus the completed SickSack robot ended up looking like this:

SickSack snake robot
 

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