[Sepsis900]

After a bit of discussion and brainstorming, we came up with a few ideas on improving the ball drive we've seen. One of the ideas is to support the weight of the robot the forward-backward drive wheels. That is, we'll put the drive wheel right above the ball and transfer the weight of the bot through the drive shaft and wheel onto the ball. This should alleviate some of the wheel-to-ball traction loss. However, this creates another problem: the other drive wheel will spin the ball in such a way that it will move perpendicular to the direction of top wheel's thrust. To use a metaphor, this is like holding a car still, and moving the ground under it to the left. We're going to need an omni wheel to handle this, but we will need one with thin free-spinning wheels to "bite into" the rubber of the ball. So here's my question: Does anybody know of any place that sells something like this? We might make an omni wheel like this ourselves, if nothing else is available, but we'd rather buy than make, because there's a lot of room to make mistakes on scales as small as this. If you guys can help us out at all, we'd really appreciate it.
On a tangent, the entire concept of a "ball drive" has turned into the subject of many immature jokes. I was wondering if the Teknokats had to deal with people making cracks about the robot's "balls", or how the team had the "balls" to make such a "ballsy" robot, or how you have to take a look at the robot's "balls" if you want to understand it.