Radio Controlled YueWalker Tracked Chassis With Robot Arm

I've wanted to put together a tracked chassis with a Robot arm for some time now, I made this particular Robot back in July and have only just got round to writing it up as we have been moving house.

The Chassis is a DFRobot YueWalker and it's considerably bigger than anything I have had before, the chassis is easy to put together with the plans being easy to read etc.

As for the Robot arm I opted to buy one of the metal kit types from Amazon, it included the Servos but at that time I thought quite expensive for what was really Pan/Tilt brackets and at the end of the day the arm just wouldn't work correctly as the Rotation, Shoulder and elbow Servo's weren't powerful enough, I changed these for more powerful Servo's which added more expense to the Project and I did away completely with the rotation Servo as it was just too weak, I opted for fastening the arm directly to the chassis and using the chassis for rotation.

The RC Transmitter(FrSky Taranis)has plenty of switches and pots and was configured as such that I could control all Robotic arm movements as well as the direction of the chassis as well, all this takes a bit of getting use to but it gets easier with practice.

As far as the build goes it was fairly simple to configure and I will take you through it in the next steps.

I listed the video for this Project on Youtube back in July and never had a chance to do the write up until now, I have 2 of the Yuewalker Chassis's

Yuewalker Tracked Chassis (DFRobot)

Cytron 10amp 7-30V R/C Motor Driver(Pi Hut)

Flysky Receiver 10 FS-IA10B (Already had)

FrSky Taranis Transmitter.(Already had)

Robot arm 6DOF c/w Servos (Amazon UK)

11.1v Lipo Battery.(Already had)

Suitable connection wires.

2 x 20Kg Servos(Amazon UK)

To start off, I built the tracked chassis, this was pretty straight forward following the instructions that came with it whereas putting the Robot arm together was a different story as there were no instructions, I got by this by looking a the photos of it on Amazon which is where it was purchased.

As I said in the introduction, this Robot arm was never going to work as the Servos which were supplied with it were far too weak, I did away with the bottom rotating Servo and replaced the shoulder and elbow Servos for more powerful 20Kg Servos these worked far better.

The wiring is pretty much straight forward for chassis control, I just connected as per the Cytron wiring diagram and you can test forward/reverse on the driver itself, you use the right stick on the transmitter for directions and mine worked correctly as soon as I turned it on.

So with the chassis wiring sorted we can now move onto wiring the servos, these are plug and play as well, allocate what you want to use for what arm movement, I used the left stick channel 3 for up/down for shoulder movement, channel 4 not used, I used the left slider to raise and lower the elbow and the left potentiometer to raise and lower the wrist, the right potentiometer is to rotate in both directions and the gripper servo is controlled by the right slider, this is all pretty confusing to start with but you do get use to it after a while.

You allocate a channel to any switch/Pot or Slider within the Transmitter, plenty of tutorials on this on Youtube etc.

I did end up slowing servo movement as well for each channel, this is done in the Taranis when allocating which switch to a channel etc.

The 10 amp driver is fed from the 11.1V Lipo using a terminal connector, I didn't have a strap to secure the battery so for the purpose of this video I secured it with an elastic band, a velcro strap would have been better.

To the testing.

For the test I thought I would set up a scenario where the chassis and arm would be involved in searching the garden for an explosive device, this was a bit of a challenge as I was using the 2nd Yuewalker chassis with onboard Pan/Tilt head tracking camera so I'm wearing the goggles, recording video on that, I'm using my iphone to record as well and I'm controlling 2 Transmitters or trying to.

The chassis and arm worked really well, arm movement using the Transmitter does take some getting use to and that's after slowing the servos down as well, good fun trying though all the same.

I honestly think this is a better way of controlling the chassis and arm rather than using Arduino and code, for this purpose anyway.

Thank's for looking.