Mowrobot Wheel

thingiverse

Update 17th May 2020: Now that a couple of weeks have passed, the robot is finally doing a good job. I'd like to give you an update on what's happened since then. The first couple of days at the end of March and the first couple of days in April weren't bad, but not perfect. Then it started getting really hot and dry weather, making the turf hard and brittle. The tractor tread isn't ideal for our clay-rich earth that gets rock-hard as it dries out. The tread just scrapes away on the hard surface without finding any grip, except for the grass that inevitably gets shredded when the robot gets stuck in the sand or something. Then I mounted the spiked wheels again and it got better. Still not perfect though. In the end, I finished modifying the flexible pillars attaching the body to the chassis. I took an angle grinder with a 4mm thick used cutting disc and inserted a slot at both ends - reducing stiffness and making collision detection much more sensitive. The used cutting disc is very important because it gives you a nice rounded slot that prevents rubber from tearing easily. I fear there's no perfect wheel tread for all conditions like car tires have for summer and winter. I'll upload the file for the spiked wheel and pictures of the modded pillars to give you an idea of what to do. But overall, I'm happy with the result because instead of having to rescue the robot during its mowing mission every day, this has come down to once or twice a week. These incidents are mostly due to our kids' toys being left hidden all over the garden and not the robot getting stuck somewhere. The first days I had already gone looking for the robot out of pure habit just to find it happily charging on the base. --------------------------------------End of update--------------------------------------- This is the fourth version of a new set of wheels for our lawn robot. The original set was literally ground away when the robot got stuck on objects in the garden where grip wasn't good enough to make collision detection work and therefore kept the wheels going until the battery died, or it was rescued. Obviously, a simple line of programming with a time limit without hitting the wire barrier would have fixed this, but as it's a cheap Mowrobot - what do you expect? So here it is, supposedly the best version yet, it's already mounted on the robot and waiting in the cellar to prove itself in the mowing season to come. BTW: This fits on the Yardforce SA600 and its derivatives such as the rebranded Mr. Gardner and Florabest versions.