Arduino
Bedfellow ! Your Friendly Self Driving Bed
Jul
Beds! Why don’t they do more? Why are they not yet smart? They need more motors, more horsepower, right? Honestly, we don’t know yet. If anyone has the answer tho, its gonna be Randofo over at Instructables.
Bedfellow started as an art project, the idea was to create a bed that could explore and with occupants aboard. The core principle was to make a bed that could intelligently drive around and avoids obstacles on its own. In order to achieve such a goal, you would have to use ultrasonic sensors, with an Arduino Mega to run your main core “The brain”. So now your probably asking your self how the heck is this thing gonna work. Its pretty simple when said bedfellow chooses a random direction in which to move to, from that point it starts checking for obstacles on that could get in the way. That’s all to it!
When taking a deeper dive into the hardware on bedfellow its packing some serious performance specs. Its drivetrain is a couple of 4 horsepower DC motors with speed controllers cribbed from a golf cart. they are fed through a 20:1 gear reduction to boost torque and avoid the bed moving to fast. According to Randofo it can comfortably hold 12 people without slowing down and overheating the system. Bedfellow is packing a lot of power and it was engineered is on point.
It’s always exciting seeing fun new DIY projects and this art project was not only fun, but it was also packing some powerful hardware under the bed.
