Rotacaster One-Kit Omniwheel

As I was building one of my previous omniwheel frames, I wondered if I could rebuild it using nothing more than the parts that came with an NXT 2.0 Retail kit and three Rotacaster omniwheels.  After a few hours I came up with this:

Quite nice and a pretty stiff frame that doesn’t bend much. Please note that not all of the colours of the pieces are completely correct in these pictures.  This is because I have a lot of them in use in other robots, but I’m sure you get the drift.

As a demonstration, I’ve created a line following program for it based on Dave Parker’s SmoothFollow program that is part of his Line Follower robot. The main differences between Dave’s version and mine are the fact that it’s for an omniwheeled robot and that I use MyBlocks extensively.  It allows me to fit most of the program on my screen without the need to pan from left to right.

Below is a little video of this robot in action.  As you can see, it moves pretty quickly. 

If you’d like to build your own copy of this robot, all you need is

• One NXT Mindstorms 2.0 Retail set
• 3 Rotacaster robot wheels
• NXT-G 2.0, which comes with your Retail set.
• Lego Digital Designer, which you can download right here: [LINK].
• The zip file with the LXF file (for LDD) and the RBTX file (for NXT-G 2.0), which you can get here: [LINK]

Stay tuned for more programs and projects with this little robot.  As you can see, it has bumpers on the back and an UltraSound sensor on the front and I have plans for those!