Engineering the Steering Mechanism

Our first and perhaps one of the biggest hurdles is to engineer a mechanism that can control the steering of the vehicle. After the winter break, my focus has been on engineering the steering control system. Michael is working on the Arduino & motor controller & Jetson. Today, I finished the first iteration of the design.

Design

First of all, I attached a TETRIX gear to the bottom of the steering wheel. Second, I made a motor mount to mount the motor on the steering column. (It’s attached to the steering column with a zip tie). After some quick testing, I concluded that there is no way to mount the motor with merely zip ties. I need to come up with something much sturdier.

Here is the plan. I will take a PVC pipe and put it around the steering column. The bottom of the PVC pipe will be attached to the front “dashboard” area of the golf cart. The motor mount will be attacked with screws. On Monday, I am planning to complete this system and test it out.

Material

We decided to use TETRIX parts for the motor mount and a high torque DC motor to steer the vehicle. The normal TETRIX motors are relatively weak. The robotics team at our school had some AnyMark high torque motors.