In the cold months of 2011 I was engaged in a project to integrate a robotic arm onto Polaris Ranger MVRS for a local law enforcement organization.
The combination of the robotic arm on a remotely operated Ranger MVRS was intended to make the vehicle more functional and effective in helping to keep humans out of harm’s way.
It was another great project. While wearing the project management hat, I got my hands dirty again and enjoyed collaborating with my colleagues at Provectus Robotics Solutions Inc. (PRS).
I was introduced to another exceptional company: WM Robots LLC. (WMR), who designs and produces Knight robots, considered by many the Cadillac of EOD industry.
WMR experts have done an incredible job at “re-packaging” the arm, power, control components and the arm structural supports for the Ranger. It just shows the beauty of virtual prototyping using CAD. The entire system was modeled without having all of the components on hand during the design, yet we were assembling all pieces on the first try with only a minor tweaks.
Some of the challenges included using existing power and communication infrastructure on the already highly customized vehicle.
PRS expertly solved the issues of arm control latency with several competing video streams over existing wireless communications. All planned ahead, the task has been accomplished by having a couple alternate types of hardware available and plenty of configuration tests and tweaks.
The project was 3 months in planning, design and fabrication and took a little over a week in execution to have all pieces working as required. Then we were contacted by the client who needed the Ranger vehicle back ASAP. We deployed even more elbow and brain grease...
The project was delivered 13 days ahead of project schedule with a fully functional system and another satisfied customer.