Design team members: Vikas Goyal, Sharon Lourduraj, Gajan Sathananthan
Supervisor: Professor Steven Waslander
Background
Cutting grass and shoveling snow are common tasks for most home owners across Canada. But these tasks can be very strenuous, and even dangerous, for many homeowners. Every year, 9400 children enter Columbia University’s hospital for lawn mower related injuries, while shoveling the driveway has been known to cause extreme fatigue and muscle pain, especially for the elderly and those with heart problems. Though there are some automated solutions that currently exist, they are often too expensive for the average consumer.
Project description
This project hopes to address the issue identified in the background by creating a vehicle that will be able to perform these household tasks. We hope to take advantage of the common aspects in the two tasks and create an adjustable platform that will be able to not only cut grass and shovel snow, but also is expandable for future applications. This multi-purpose design with reduce the cost per task substantially, hopefully bringing these robots within the price range of most homeowners. This robot will be remote controlled via a laptop with a Wi-Fi connection that runs a software package created by the team.
Design methodology
After a high level design was created, a physical analysis was done of the system to determine the requirements and performance criteria for the robot in terms of this like motor torque and battery capacity. These were then used to refine the design further and ensure that all requirements were being met. A very in-depth vehicle model was then created to model things like slip on the tires and battery operation in cold weather. Using this data, the final design was created. A high level drawing of the vehicle is shown below.
Over the next few months this design will be implemented in the creation of a prototype. The prototype will be a fully-functioning, though potentially scaled down, version of an actual production model. Further analysis will be done to determine potential retail price, feasibility of automating the robot, maintenance requirements and lifetime.
Look here for future updates!
