Dynamic conveyor belt

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lydie
Posts: 2
Joined: 14 Jan 2022, 11:11

Dynamic conveyor belt

Post by lydie »

Hi,

I would like to put a conveyor belt (generic conveyor) on the top of the mobile robot Pioneer_p3dx. However, the conveyor belt is not dynamic so when I assembled the conveyor with the robot and I ran the model, I got a message saying "it appears there is at least 1 static respondable shape built on top of a dynamic tree structure...". So, I tried to check the box "body is dynamic" of all the conveyor_pad and of the conveyor_shape. I don't have the message anymore, but the result is not the one expected. The behave of the conveyor belt when I run the simulation is strange: the conveyor pads are ok but the conveyor shape is not following the robot and ended up falling. I tried to change its mass, like it said in the tutorial, but nothing change. How could I do to keep the conveyor dynamic with a normal behave (following the robot). Is it important to put the conveyor in dynamic mode, or it could work with the static one?

Thank you in advance,
Lydie Jay

coppelia
Site Admin
Posts: 10336
Joined: 14 Dec 2012, 00:25

Re: Dynamic conveyor belt

Post by coppelia »

Hello,

this is the normal behaviour of those conveyors. If you need a conveyor whose base is attached to a dynamically enabled object, then you need to adjust your approach, and use joints and cylinders to simulate the belt, similar to the caterpillar model in Models/components/locomotion and propulsion/caterpillar.ttm (e.g. you can attach the caterpillar model to one of the Pioneer's force/torque sensor).

The reason for that is that you need a joint to propulse a dynamically enabled shape.
You can of course also attach a static conveyor on top of a mobile robot, but then the conveyor will not influence the robot whatsoever, even if the conveyor collides with a static wall, etc.

Cheers

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