sphere bot

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Elgin Clock

Yeah.. We talked about making/buying one of our freshman a hamster ball to run around Atlanta in when we were looking for covers for our dome and I stumbled upon this site.

Run awaaaaaaaay!

[MConte05]

Sorry about bringing back an old topic. But.....

Since the build season is over with, I've been toying around with ideas to make an "off-season" bot strictly for fun. One ideas that I sorta devolped on was a sphere-bot, using 3 "wheels" which would really be custom made plastics that would fit around the frame and be powered by a CIM motor. All three of them would work off of the same motor, going in the same direction. The steering would be comprised of a pendulum sort of device that shifts the spheres center of gravity to one side or another to allow it to angle in and turn. I'm posting some sketches and Inventor models I made to help visualize this...... Any ideas or improvements would be greatly appricaiated!





Another idea I had was a belt driven spherebot. Where there would be 4 belts (driven independtly by 4 CIM motors) that control the direction and speed. I made a rather detailed Inventor model here: