material to build your own bot

In pervious posts we have studied step by step all about Electronic Components, Equipment’s and tool.

Which are Important in Robotics and will help you to create your own bot.

Now the time to study about the material to build (or create) body of your bot.

In this post we will study step by step about commonly used material to made body a robot.

Material to build bot body

To build a robot’s body, we need to select a building material for it. Following are some of the choices available:

1.        Paper

Paper and cardboard are often overlooked as far as choosing the material to make a robot’s body is concerned, but they can prove to be handy as they are easy to work with and give faster results. There are lot of varieties of paper and paper products which can serve as robot body building materials. Moreover, you would find them in your home itself and you won’t have to spend money on them at all.

There are a number of different papers,
cardboards and foam-backed boards that could be used as part of a robot’s structure; all you require is a bit of imagination. You may not have thought of this, but paper and cardboard which serve as packing materials for appliances are really strong and tough and thus are excellent materials for building your robots and different parts of them. Also, you won’t require any sophisticated and complex tools like a drill or a lathe or welding machine, you can just do everything with a pair of scissors, a cutter, some glue and adhesive tape. The parts made from a piece of cardboard are much easier to ensure proper fit and clearances with other parts. Many people first make a prototype of the desired robot with cardboard and after they are done with it, they make the final robot with materials like wood or metals.

The only disadvantage to use cardboard as material for your robot is its ability to soak water and moisture, and this proves very critical if you are designing a robot which will traverse through wet or moist surfaces.

2.        Wood

One of the most easily available materials for making robots, wood has always been the favourite for robot builders .There are many different wood varieties and products to choose from for use in a robot’s structure and each one of them has its own characteristic feature that affect its suitability in different parts of the robot’s body. The biggest advantages of using a wood are its ability to be worked using inexpensive hand tools like wood saw and also its fairly low cost. If you plan to use wood as a material to build the structure of your robot,

you are advised to use the hardest woods available (such as oak). Very hard woods will handle high loads comfortably and, more importantly, will not split at bolt attachment points. Soft woods like balsa should always be avoided. Also, while fastening the pieces of wood to other pieces, nuts and bolts should be used instead of screws to minimize the chance that the wood will be damaged or the holes will open up due to vibration.

Along with solid pieces of wood, you may also consider using a composite wood product like plywood, which consists of many sheets of wood glued together under pressure in such a way that its strength is augmented. Plywood is often manufactured from softer woods like spruce and the final product is much stronger than the sum of its constituents.

However you should not use composite materials like chipboard, as they cannot sustain much vibration and thus are inappropriate for robot body building purposes.

3.        Plastics

Probably the number of plastic varieties available in the market is far greater than that of all varieties of other materials combined. Determining the correct type of plastic for a specific application can be a very arduous task and may take an unreasonably long period of time. Instead, if you want to work with plastics, it’s better to pick a random variety which is available to you easily and start working on it, because all varieties of plastics are generally strong and tough, and thus are well suited for robot building applications.

Still, there are two most popular types of plastics you can consider:

4.       Thermoset plastics

They are hard, tough and have a compactly meshed molecular structure. They are generally hardened in a mould using chemicals, and during this process they tend to release a lot of heat. This type of plastics can only be shaped by machining as heating them up will destroy

the molecular structure and will make the material useless. Thermosets are generally used in hard plastic toys, appliances, furniture and other products which require high structural strength.

5.       Elastomer plastics

They have a similar molecular structure to thermosets, but they have elastic characteristics also. Elastomers too, like thermosets, cannot be shaped up by heating.