Controlling the Beast

I’ve spent a lot of time watching the current prototype climbing over large obstacles and it appears that when it’s in an awkward position it might be very useful to have complete control over which wheels have power going to them. If the motors are embedded in the wheel hubs then this would be easy to achieve. The only thing that needs to be given much consideration here is the user controls. The image below shows an initial concept of what these controls might look like:

Whilst this is just a concept, research could be done into ergonomics and inspiration taken from gaming controllers:

As mentioned though, delivering drive to individual wheels is easy if each wheel has an embedded motor. If one motor is used for each side of the vehicle, so one motor for three wheels, it becomes far more complicated. I’m not sure how this would work but I imagine it would have something to do with engaging and disengaging gears.

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