well I gotta admit I have robo-envy! It looks very cool, but I wonder about how it would handle an 18 inch snowfall. Sometimes size is an issue and when pushing deep heavy snow into a bank, it's all about size. Sometimes I have to get out the JD350 crawler..... One thing I found interesting was the use of pneumatics for plow controls. My ET bucket loader is hydraulic/electric. It inefficient in the extreme because the battery driven hydraulic pump is pressurizing a circuit even if you are not using the controls. I would assume the robo-plow has a compressor charging an air pressure reservoir. Why not just use electric actuators? If I were designing an ET bucket loader from scratch, I'd probably try to use 36 volt very heavy duty electric actuators instead of the hydraulic/electrics in the original ET bucket loader design. It might be slower, but I'm sure it would be kinder to the power supply too. One drawback I see is trying to keep actuators on opposite sides of the loader frame "synched" so that one actuator doesn't run a little faster that the other and jam the whole thing up. I guess that using stepping motors on the actuators and counting revolutions with a little digital controller could solve that. Another use for actuators would be to raise a plow. I have a plow on my ATV which is cable winch raised, similar to the plow on an ET. You can't do down pressure on a cable plow - it's all gravity. I am thinking (for the ATV anyway) that I will use an actuator that can be easily clamped to the front rack of the ATV and give my both down and up pressure. Same thing could be done to substitute for the winch on the ET. Off to the basement to check the inventory! From: RJ Kanary [mailto:rjkanary consolidated net] |