[EricH]

Originally Posted by AmoryG

That's a really neat drivetrain. It's interesting because this is much different from all of my ideas I've had so far. I turned my thoughts away from doing it like this because I always imagined the ball would slip around or would be too smooth to control. It's nice to see an effective way to use balls instead of wheels.

But are there any designs which are effective using only balls and no wheels? That's what I'm going for.

Not that I know of, however, it could be done given enough motors. I think the reason is, not enough decent motors. You need 2 per wheel, and that means 8 motors. Yeah, we have that many. No, they aren't all what we'd want for that. We'd need 4 CIMs, 2 FPs, and 2 globes. Not enough decent motors left to put much on top of the drive, unless pneumatics are used for an arm. (Banebots, window, and maybe van door are left.)