Tank Mk4 is the latest in our fleet of autonomous tanks. The plan is to have the tank retail at an affordable £5000 making it the obvious robot of choice for private security companies, army units or other branches of the military. Thus far we have only managed to develop the hull and driving gear of the vehicle.

mk4 design from the side

Upgrades from MK3 and MK2

When comparing the MK4 to MK2 and MK3, the thing you notice straight away is the mudguards. This design change has caused a few minor issues with the tank tracks however all has been resolved. The new mudguards serve a very important job, they stop the mud, grass and shit getting sprayed up onto the tank. On previous versions the amount of grass and muck caused the robotic arm to fail.

Another key difference is the design of the gear box. the biggest change has been moving the output shaft as close to the bottom of the hull as possible. This is to prevent the tank from bottoming out when climbing over curbs or other slopes. This has also meant the hull didn’t need to be quite so deep, making the the hull lighter.

Another key difference has been the huge upgrade in motors. We have gone from using hobby grade RC brushless motors to using our custom designed and manufactured in house brushless motors which are capable of outputting a much higher torque and velocity when coupled with our newly developed 24v lipo battery. This means we now have a much much higher acceleration and top speed. The top speed is actually yet to be measured as last time we tried to push the throttle above 50% the whole gearbox was ripped apart while the tank was moving at 30mph, causing us to make some major redesigns. We are now developing a metal gearbox to take the high speed stresses of the new motors.

With all that extra power and speed, there have been some minor issues with the suspension and tracks. As the speed increases, the tank track has been found to oscillate rather a lot which results in the track

s coming off or jamming. To try and counter this our first intuition was to increase the track tension. This was the solution which worked on MK2. We have now figured out the root of our problems to be in the suspension. A new suspension is currently being manufactured much stronger than ever before. Everything has been beefed up to prevent any other movement than vertical.

When all of these minor design changes have been sorted out, we will begin development of the turret and any other accessories such as robotic arms.