Gantry Bot - Stuff We Made (Axis)

In this project, we used the MotorGo Axis to make a programmable gantry robot. This is cool because you can get sick hyperlapse shots and creative videos without breaking the bank. 

As this was an earlier project, we used a dev version of the MotorGo Axis and EncoderGo get repeatable, smooth motion. The video version of the Gantry Bot didn't feel polished enough to release, but we're happy to upload the files to our Printables for folks to remix if there's interest. Drop us a line in our Discord if you want these designs! 

How does this work? 

Very simply, we attached two gimbal motors to aluminum extrusion. One motor moved the camera platform along the extrusion (truck), and the other motor turned the camera (pan). You can get a flavor for the design in the cross section below:

You can see the geared truck motor (left) and the pan motor (right). Because of the EncoderGos, each motor had closed-loop position control. This also lends itself to path programming and consistent repetition. To set the path, we just put the robot into 'record mode' and moved it through a path we wanted it to do. Then, because it remembered all the locations it passed through, it was able to easily repeat the motion over and over. 

The MotorGo Axis' built-in WiFi and Bluetooth support makes it easy to turn this into a self-contained wireless robot. You could also add a second Axis to add tilt and roll to the available camera angles. 

What did we learn? 

We built this robot while developing the MotorGo Axis. Making this work really helped us with motion control, WiFi communication, and general electrical testing. These tools came in handy in future projects like the Etch A Sketch robot and our Rover. 

Conclusion 

This was an earlier project at Every Flavor of Robot that taught us a lot about path planning, motion control, and helped us test the basic MotorGo functions. There's lots of improvements to be made. Hopefully one day we can come back to this and make it crazy :)