Casters
We have the first real mechanical components of PR2 assembled - the steerable driven casters that move it around. These were built by Function Engineering, and we're in the process of testing and building them together into a base. The sensor with three wires hanging off is a hall-effect sensor for absolute calibration of rotation. The caster also has three motors and three incremental encoders - one to rotate the caster and one to drive each wheel.
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would you increase stability (wider track) and reliability (less chance of snagging) if the belt drive to the wheels was mounted inboard of the wheel instead of outboard?
Yes, but there are two big reasons not to do that.
We can't increase the distance between the wheels, because that would make the whole caster larger and we would either become too big to go through doorways or lose too much space for electronics in the center of the base.
We also can't just move the belts to the center of the caster, because the motors are long enough that they have to go all the way across the caster, and the middle space in the caster is full of the motor drivers for the caster motors.