Personal Project - Navie 2

About the project

Navie 2 is the successor to Navie 1, which ultimately failed at its goal of being a room mapping robot. This robot improves on the design in numerous ways:

Battery: Navie 1 had a large 2s battery strapped on top, connected with a simple XT60 connector. This was unstable, unsightly, and required a specialized charger. Navie 2 integrates an 18650 into the core chassis (more on this later), and includes built-in USB-C charging!

Modular design: As part of this design, I wanted to be able to create different mission payloads that could easily be swapped. So Navie 2's lower chassis is a completely self-contained and functional robot. It includes battery, motors, control electronics, WIFI and bluetooth connectivity, and a magnetic expansion port on top which shares 5v power and an I2C bus. This allows it to interact as master (for expansions such as a forklift) or slave (for expansions such as the navigation pack).

Sensors: Part of the issue with Navie 1 was a over-scoping of the project. Looking back, custom stereo cameras with a custom SLAM backend might have been a bit much to chew off. Navie 2 has the potential to explore the same technologies with its modular expansion design, but a 2D Lidar based approach is going to be much easier to start with.

Movement: A desired improvement in this design was for the vehicle to be off-road capable. To accomplish this, I used a tracked system rather than the 2 wheel and drag system employed in the previous design. I also upgraded the motors to higher quality N20 motors, increasing top speed and torque.

Control Electronics: The last design used the L298N (Cheap, reliable, and most importantly cheap), which suffered from low efficiency and a massive space claim. This design uses the much more efficient (and MUCH smaller) DRV8833, which drastically decreases the space claim of the electrical systems, allowing the entire core chassis to fit in a 12mm sliver.

Technologies

Relevant Links

Github

Gallery