Robots

This is my current project and the robot I’ll be taking to Lego World.  Tammy took these pictures for me.  Click on them to see a much bigger version. It has 2 Zamor canons, 4 Rotacaster wheels, HiTechnic Gyro and Acceleration Sensors and a Lego Sonar sensor. It’s programmed in ROBOTC. It’s a holonomic robot, meaning it can move in ...

My next project with the omniwheel is to have it react to bumping into things that it encounters on its journey.  I want to use the HiTechnic Accelerometer to do it, the Mindsensors one is currently being used in another project. I’ve been racking my brain for about 2 days now, analysing the data from the runs, trying to come ...

The “Minifig Vomit Mobile” is what my friend Marc-Andre called the omniwheel I took the video of.  I felt that in order for that name to be more accurate, I had to add a minifig to the robot, so here he is, on the left.  Unfortunately, this one has no internal organs, being a skeleton and all, so there is, ...

Literally. The omniwheel is capable of going in any direction you want, it can also rotate on the spot.  So I thought, why not combine the two and make it rotate and move?  After picking Brian Davis’ sizable brain about using a gyro as a means to calculate a heading, I tweaked my old program and came up with this. ...

The Rotacaster wheels are not only great for making holonomic robotic platforms but also for the more mundane robotics models such as the one pictured above.  This is a simple construction meant to illustrate the idea. The advantage of using a wheel like this over a standard caster wheel is that this can take a lot more weight without losing ...

I made a quick video to show off the Rotacaster wheels.  As you can see traction is really great.  I will do further testing on various surfaces. The wheels’ small size give you great control when directly driving them from the motor; there is no need for additional gearing down.  This allows you to make a very compact construction. Additional ...

This morning the mailman had another package for me!  It was a padded envelope with nothing less than the 4 Technic axle compatible holonomic wheel prototypes from Rotacaster.  I haven’t had a chance to build anything with them but my first impressions are: Very compact, they’re about 3.5 units wide and about 6 units in diameter; Quiet!  They’re all plastic, ...

My good friend Eric likes to build big.  He is one of the designers and builders of the High Bay Storage System. A while back he told he wanted to build a tracked vehicle. He’s done this before, of course: Very nice, right? Not satisfied with this Lilliputian-sized tank (actual Lilliputians ride around in this), he set about making something ...

I’ve uploaded a new release of the ROBOTC Driver Suite. Version 1.5 has a couple of nice changes: Newly added: Drivers for Dexter Industries dFlex, dPressure and temp probe Test program for Mindsensors Touch Sensor MUX with HiTechnic Sensor MUX Driver for additional timers in ROBOTC Documentation changes: All drivers sorted by manufacturer for easy lookup (thanks to John Hansen ...

It seems balancing robots are all the rage now.  Laurens Valk made one that even hit the Make: Magazine’s blog.  It just so happened that Gus from HiTechnic was thinking the same thing a few weeks ago and has made one as well.  It’s a different model and also works with RCX, NXT 1.0 and 2.0 sized wheels.  The HTWay ...