General purpose Scalable Gantry

A general purpose rig which can navigate a 2D plane, vertically or horizontally, fit for many precision tasks such as:

• Cleaning / Scaling buildings
• Painting/ Scaling buildings or ground
• Agriculture where it can water/ seed and harvest crops
• Smart warehouses where everything has a co-ordinate for every item in the shelf and it will move the item to a collection point
• Smart factories which the rig could bring a specific item to the workstation e.g mechanical parts 

A general-purpose API will be available to facilitate the creation of custom programs.

Motivation

The reasoning for us picking this as a project idea would be to simplify and reduce risk to workers in many different use cases. It's far cheaper than the alternative of metal versions which cost a huge amount and take a long time to set up. Anything which is necessary to do in a 2D plane can simply be automated with this sort of system. 

Mechanism 

Simple but effective uses three ball bearings to push the rope against the gear creating a friction fit. This causes a serious amount of resistance when external forces act on the gantry system but when powering the motor it moves freely; allowing for precision actions to take place it could be possible to use G-Code with a stepper motor to easily control but allow the system to be precise. 

 Another example of a similar product would be skycam at football stadiums, this uses three cables to move the camera within the stadium simply by reeling cable in and out. 

A similar example would be another method which uses two cables adjacent for 2-DOF; this allows the total area to be navigated using polar coordinates. 

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9416838

Possible Routes for development of the mechanism                       

Gantry System:

There's three possible solutions for what we want to do:

1. Polar Coordinate system.
2. Skycam technology
3. Novel Gantry design

Skycam Technology

This uses three ropes all attached to robot which is reeled towards different sections of the stadium, this allows the camera complete access to the whole field just by lengthening and shortening the cables. This gives it a hovering/ flying effect and allows precision movement across the area while keeping the camera/ chassis moving at a high speed.

Novel Gantry design

Using three ropes you can create a gantry in a H formation, allowing for two exterior robots to control the height or depth, while the centre part of the robot can freely move in-betweens these points. This allows the gantry to maintain a certain rigidity while allowing it to be precise, this also means that it can be used in many different applications including, agriculture, smart warehouses, smart factories and even scaling buildings to do precision tasks.

 

Polar coordinate system:

The polar system approach would utilize 2 ropes connected to the 2 top edges of the area being traversed. The robot will only need 2 DOF to effectively cover the entire area of a rig. This can be achieved by the use of polar coordinates.

Below is a representation of a polar coordinate compared to rectangular coordinate. Rectangular coordinates. This requires an X and Y values and 3 DOF to find its target. Polar coordinates however require the angle and the distance from the origin and only needs 2 DOF to find Point p.

Below is a Arduino library for converting Cartesian coordinates to polar or vies versa. This means we can design a system using the Cartesian method and convert that to polar for use in the robot.

Polar coordinates

Machine vision

Machine vision could be implemented into the robot so it can determine dirty stops from areas it's already cleaned. The open CV library could be used in combination with a custom algorithm for the most efficient detection system for the application.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10417559

https://ms.copernicus.org/articles/15/31/2024/

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9416838