rag
USA
Asked
— Edited
Hi, I just stumbled on this website and am truly amazed at the concept and the possibilities of building our own robots! I am thinking of building a snow blower robot that is powerful enough to tackle large and heavy snow like a foot to 14 inches. Ideally I want to automate a two-stage gas powered snow blower to run autonomously via remote control or better yet, to re-play a preset snow clearing path. I did see a sample here of a snow plow but I am looking for some thing more powerful. Any suggestions on how best to do this is welcome.
Keep up the Revolution!
Thanks, Rag
Given how dangerous the front end of a Snowblower is, I would not recommend fully automatic, particularly with a two stage. You could script a pattern for it to follow rather than remote controlling all the turns, but make sure you keep a key depressed so it stops and fails safe if your attention wanders so you don't wind up driving over children or animals.
A lot about how you control it will depend on how it drives manually. Ideally you would want something with independent drive wheels that are cable actuated so you could just hook up a heavy duty servo or small motor to each steering controller. Steering wheels are tougher, but could be replaced with a motor or heavy duty servo modified for continuous rotation.
Alan