Gas Engine Powered Robot Project
As a fun summer project on the robotics team, a couple of teammates and I worked on designing and building a gas engine powered robot. This project got us working on things outside of our normal fields, such as rebuilding an engine, and getting parts from different generations of control systems to work together to control this robot. We needed to do this project using as small a budget as possible, while integrating as many normal robot components as possible, without having the weight and size constraints of normal FRC robots.
Parts
- Honda GX160 Engine
- ECOTRONS Small Engine Fuel Injection Conversion Kit
- Custom Exhaust Kit
- Donated Go Kart Frame
- New Wheels, Bearings, and Axles
- Linear Actuator for Steering
- Hydraulic Brake Kit
- 3 Solid State Relays
- Normal FRC RoboRIO and Motor Speed Controllers
Details
The engine we decided to use for this was a Honda GX160 - a 4 stroke, 5.5 horsepower, 160 CC carbureted engine. For robot control we needed to convert the engine from old fashion carbureted to modern fuel injection technology. I helped disassemble the engine, swap out the internal springs, replace the sealing gaskets and put together the new throttle mechanism required for fuel injection. We, then, soldered together a custom wiring harness for the new control computer and oxygen, air pressure, and exhaust sensors. In order to be able to control the engine with our traditional robotics control system, we implemented a series of relays that can enable and start the engine, as well as, a small servo motor to move the throttle. For the steering system, we built a linear actuator with built in limit switches and wired them into our standard robot motor controller. One problem we had to overcome is that some of the robotics components were older than others, and couldn’t all communicate on the same CAN network together. To fix this, we manually added the needed resistor value into the circuit to trick them into thinking they are all connected properly.
Later that summer, I gave a presentation about our Gas Engine robot at the annual FIRST Robotics Summit meeting at Christopher Newport University which can be found here.
