As promised, I added one more vid of omniBOT (aka Jon Tyler) to this listing. J.T. is an autonomous roamer with three servos attached to holonomic wheels. Code is pbasic using a Basic Stamp and BOE serial with a USB converter stick. The code was revised from a bi-directional platform to that of a three wheeled holonomic platform. omniBOT navigates using a Ping sensor. His routines are fairly efficient; avoiding and navigating around most obstacles. The general chassis build took less than a couple hours. The programming added considerable time to the project given I had to figure out the geometry of the holonomic wheels and adapt bi directional code to purpose. Most of his components are leftovers from previous bot builds. Thanks to Parallax, Budget Robotics, Acroname, and Folgers for the coffee can lid. More to come.
If you just watch the sensor it just seems to knowingly float along while a bunch of unassociated things whirl below it. Great stuff. I heard that James A. Folger thinks you are a very talented person.
I actually have delved into the Arduino. It’s just that I have a few of these BOEs lying around with Basic Stamps plugged into them. I am Stamp happy. Arduino seems very flexible and a bit more cost effective. Plus the Arduino community has grown dramatically. So, yes, I do plan on jumping into Arduino with both feet in the future. Thanks for the comment.
I am also a fan of the basic stamp and use the BS2PE stamp for my robots. I experimented with 4 wheel omniwheel robots last year without much sucess. I think rubber or silicon coated wheels would work much better. Put that idea on the shelf until until wheels get better. Higher speed DC motors I have also seen and a bit better. Check some of my older stuff under Prettybird on this site. I am moving in the direction of using the Parallax Propeller chip. Your 3 wheel design does seem to work a bit better. I was wondering if you could send be the code. As I mentioned, I also use basic stamp some and like the BS2PE because you don’t have to change the servo and freqout commands like you do with other higher power basic stamps.
Thanks for the comment. There are fairly good wheel choices available now. Just do a web search and you’ll find bunches of sources for these wheels. The holonomic wheels I used for my omniBOT are 4cm black poly with 8mm center bore that I found through the Acroname Robotics website. The black rubberized feature grants proper friction that the plastic wheels do not. They also have larger diameter wheels. The larger diameter is best for carpeted surfaces. A gear motor would afford the proper torque for any surface. I used standard Parallax continuous rotation servos for this bot. With proper torque, the movement geometry is really cool with 4 wheels, affording multiple degrees of movement depending on spin and rate of spin of each wheel. Gear motors would work better on a four wheel chassis. A regular four wheel drive chassis design with holonomic wheels provides and entirely different robot programming experience. Everything changes when holonomic wheels are brought into the picture. truly cool.
