Introduction
Scorpion is a Lidar Powered autonomous multiutility robot. The bot is driven by 2 DC Motors through a bevel gear transmission case. An Nvidia Jetson Nano Devkit is the brains of this machine and the Driving ECU is an Arduino Nano communicating with the Jetson Nano through Pyfirmata. It’s a 3×2 Drive system boasting a very low Centre of gravity as such, therefore the chances of scorpion loosing traction even on loose dirt are slim. The overall dimensions of Scorpion are 380 x 280 x 200 mm (l x b x h) with a relatively very good ground clearance of 50 mm.
Purpose
Scorpion offers a wide range of application possibilities. The design is done in such a way that it can be adapted into a lot of use cases. One can mount a robotic arm onto it and send it away for an Un-Manned Vehicular Operation or can make it into a food delivery robot or a site surveying cum map generation system. It has enough power under the hood to even tow a substantial load behind it. Possibilities with a machine like the scorpion are endless.
Current Status
In it’s present state, Scorpion can take a hardcoded trajectory and traverse it while avoiding any sort of obstacles in it’s path. Alongside we have developed a robotic camera arm that’s compatible with scorpion and will add remote monitoring capabilities to this system.
Future Plan
Ultimate plan is to make scorpion fully autonomous, give it a relatively menial task and prove our strength by getting it to flawlessly executing the task. We also plan to develop a lot of expansion systems to broaden the scope of Scorpion’s out of the box functionalities. A few examples of such expansion slots can be A Cargo Basket, A Towable Battery Expansion, An Automatic UPI QR Code Payment system so that it we can send it to get us food from our collage canteen 🙂
Looking forwards, we plan to scale up the system and refine the use cases further. One of the central goals is to make a version suitable for disaster management operations. Such a robot will be very helpful in site analysis, Life detection and essential supply delivery operations.
We aim at making Scorpion better integrate with other systems developed by our team such as Drone, Remote Site Monitoring System, etc.