This is our robot this year! tell us what you think.
Those are some super sweet omni wheels. How much traction do you have on the HDPE?
[edit] are those rollerblade wheels on the front?[edit]
Cory
Thanks, i’ll pass the compliment on to one of our teachers that made developing a set of omniwheels his pet project. All parts on that wheel were made by us except for the bearings which i think came out of the wheel chair wheels. There are two sheets of polycarbonate, with wooden rollers on each set, with either sheet individually, it would be like driving on a set of cogs, but the teacher worked out the geometry so that if you look down the axle, the two non-round, components, when offset 45 degrees, form a perfect circle. The wooden rollers are actually pieces of 2x4, cut closely to shape on a table saw, then turned down on this neat little mini-lathe/mill combo thing we have. They are completely unpowered actually, so it doesn’t matter how well they grip anywhere, we noticed 3 years ago using swiveling castors on the ramp created some big problems, so we wanted some sort of non-swiveling castors that would work better than skids. We didn’t have time for a whole lot of testing, losing a week and a half out of 6 weeks due to snow will cause that to happen, but our other wheels (the powered sets) seemed to have fairly decent grip. I’ll work on getting a better picture of those omniwheels loaded soon.