Project: Compact Dual Differential
In our continued quest for the "perfect" dual differential design we came across yet another that looked promising. Our first two attempts, the Ferrari design and the Dartmouth design, resulted in a robot that was too top heavy or a drivetrain that was too fragile. We wanted something small and sturdy. One of the coaches at Hacienda did a web search and found two designs by Alex Wetmore and his father. Alex's father's design fit our search criteria better in that it was more compact. After studying the design a bit we came up with an improvement for making it even more compact. Our third dual differential design looks like this:

You will find most of the parts needed to build this design in the standard Mindstorms kit. You will need two differential gears (of course) as well as a couple of 1x1 bricks with a hole in them. Here's the complete list of parts to build the model shown above:

Not shown in the building instructions here is how to attach the motors. Connect the motors directly to the differential gear housings. The frontmost one drives the wheels while the one to the rear is for turning.

Proceed to step 1 of the building instructions to begin building this dual differential design.

Copyright © 2003, Hacienda Robotics Program.