Enter Turbo-shepherd

 The Shepherds Pi challenge has been looked at a bit, but after a few trial runs with wooden paddles and cardboard sheep, it was obvious a bit of extra manipulation was going to be necessary to do it quickly, and not just shove the sheep and wolves around. Enter a pair or arms to help.

The arms are articulated to fold flat to the chassis, and then when folded out, articulate half way along to allow nudging, flipping and to form a funnel. Each arm can also be raised and lowered to be lifted out of the way quickly to provide easier chassis manoeuvring. Building arms this way also provides a mechanism to provide for gate opening and closing.

The first prototype for this has been built but currently a bit slow for competition, but will be ok for testing the concept and planning movements.

No peace for the busy, the basic Hungry Cattle hopper feeders work but when a side funnel is fitted, the rate of dispensing goes down and even stops unless the funnel has a steep angle. Experiments with this has set a good angle at 40 degrees or more which raises the hopper height by at least 100mm, making the whole robot approach 300mm height. This is ok in the rules but there will be a bit of weight in the feed so may make the chassis unstable at speed.

So a new concept is under review, rotating hoppers which sit in a carrousel and rotate out over the trough to be filled.

In the barn/filling position, the hoppers sit inside the footprint of the chassis, openings pointing upwards.

When alongside the trough, the carousel rotates to position a hopper over the trough where it empties and the chassis them moves on to the next trough. While the chassis is moving, the carrousel rotates again to position the next hopper, ready to empty in the next trough. Returning to the barn, the carousel rotates back to the starting position.

Because the hoppers now have larger openings, its expected that the rate of discharge will be faster than the previous design, and will be more reliable, there being no closing mechanism to jam. Placing the carousel like this also gives a clearer view for the stereo vision system to navigate.

That's all for now, more experiments to do, bits to make and robots to crash!!!