ROB2 Omni-directional wheeled robot
My second robot, ROB2 was an experiment with omni-directional wheels. I decided on a 3 wheeler as it fascinated me the most. I cut out a couple triangles and went to work. He has an Arduino Mega, sonar, gyro, wireless camera and an Xbee.
The video shows the robot driving around in any direction, forwards, back, and sideways. The front is the side with the bread board. ROB2 makes use of a gyro, and boy does the gyro help on this type of robot. When you see him wobble a little when driving sideways, that is the gyro correcting to keep the robot driving straight. I hadn’t yet equalized all the drive motors, so one runs a little faster then the others, another binds a little and drives slower then the others. Motors driving at different speeds causes unwanted rotation.
At the same time I made the robot, I also constructed a controller, ICE1, using 2 PS3 style thumbsticks, buttons, and an Xbee for wireless communication. Later I added panels for a body, mounted a sonar and wireless camera. You can see more info at http://axorion.com/through-the-eyes-of-the-robot/
Since then I have finished ICE2. A controller with 4 joysticks, 2 rotary encoders, and an 128x64 pixel OLED screen. The robot communicates the range of the sonar back to the controller, so I can see how far an object is from the robot. More info at http://axorion.com/build-finished/