So here are some rough sketches of my first robot. I'm going to order the parts today, all of which are in the start here robot:) But I'm going to change it up a bit and see if i can put a few bumper sensors in. It's going to be a silver sphere, that I'm going to cut into three, I will use the outside pieces as wheels and then i will put two very small wheels perpendicular to those on the bottom of the middle section, all of the wires and motors and power supply will go inside of it, so it should be very clean looking from the outside:)
Here’s a simular robot body, I guess the weight (read batteries) at the bottom keeps it upright.
I'm sure it's not 100% perpendicular at all times, so I guess you'd have to stop the robot and leave enough of a pause to guarantie that it has stopped swinging back-and-forth before running any distance sensors.
But tell me how you intend the 2 small wheels to function. With the outer parts of the ball working as two big wheels it can turn on the spot by running one wheel in each direction, how can any additional wheels make that any better?
Balls I have a plan for a spherical robot with no wheels. Trouble is I have no clue what to use as the outer shell. What do you plan on using as your sphere?
If your shell is light enough, the resultant force from the robot “moving/rolling” forward (with inner wheels) should roll the ball forward (like a hamster ball, except gravity does a bit of that work too). You can balance it by putting something heavy on a low point of your robot too.
Then for turning, you can use a gyro-type set up. like a disk with a motor, with area vector pointing up. When the disk turns CW, the shell and robot turn CCW and vice-versa (assuming the floor is slippery enough).
edit in fact, if you put the disk low under the robot’s underbelly, it can be the counterweight AND gyro-turning-gizmo at the same time.
One more thing: for distance juding, I suggest IR, since sonar would kinda bounce around inside. (but I’m sure you knew that)
Sorry, it’s your project, it just gave me so many ideas I had to share them with you. Dam, now I want to build one.
I bought one of these metal spheres from scarborough ( i know thats not the right spelling) fair and it’s hollow so I’m going to cut it open and use that as my outer shell. And I think that if I hook up just one extra servo to those two bottom wheels I could have it spin 360’s if I want, I guess I just thought it was a better idea at 3 in the morning when I thought it up:) I think it would be cool if i had it following me around or something. Thanks so much for the feedback! In my opinion it’s the more the merrier!
