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Originally Posted by John Wanninger
Nice bots, John. Very inventive trigger/flipper on the Ping-pong bot. That Swerve bot has some really slick moves - I'm rather curious as to how you handle the control mapping to the RC-transmitter. How does it do on carpeting? Did you ever try it with an omni-wheel on the non-pivoting axle? You keep shining the light of possibilities - keep on inspiring us John!
(I think Radio Shack just found itself a new catalog cover)
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John,
Thanks for the compliments!
The swerve-bot has two different control modes. A button on the transmitter (Ch. 6, I believe) switches between the two modes.
Expert Mode-
(No programming required). There is a servo spinning each wheel, and a motor driving each wheel. The motors are mapped to the Y-Axis of the controller, and the servos mapped to the X-Axis. Each joystick then individually controls one of the wheels. It takes a little skill to drive, but it grants you some great control (plus, it is cool to do it with no code). If you point the wheels in opposite directions, and run them out away from each other, it does a cool little shimmy (but doesn't damage the bot).
Basic Mode-
(Minor programming). The left stick is a standard 1-stick tank drive (in Vex terms, that is 12 mode). The left stick X-axis controls both servos, they are linked in code to spin together. The X-axis of the right joystick is nulled if the x-axis of the left stick is past a certain threshold (so the wheels won't fight each other, if you try to turn while strafing sideways).
We threw an omni-wheel on the back end, and the handling didn't change much. Those bald, grey plastic wheels are relatively low friction. We wanted it to be 1-kit only. In retrospect we could have eliminated the extra servo, but we liked the independant wheel control.
After seeing how easy it is, I hope there are a lot more swerving robots in the 2006 FVC.
-JV