Three new robots have been unveiled at VexLABS!
For more information:
http://www.vexlabs.com/vex-triplets.shtml
Every single of the 3 robots are cool. My favorite one is the swerve drive followed by the tank tread ball shooter.
It’s pretty cool to watch what these robots can do.
BUTTTTTT… Beer bot still beats any of these 3. 
boo whooo, i still just want a kit. anyways, those are sweet and arefin is right, the bottle bot is the best.
Ya know John, a VEX swerve bot is first on my Christmas list 
Sweet bots, John! Looks like you’re in your dream job at IFI/VEX Labs.
I look forward to trying to duplicate some of the things you’ve done once school starts back up. Especially the SOBbot!
Keep em’ coming!
Sean
Oh this is soo awesome, looks like somebody here has one of the 3 coolest jobs in the world. Well anyway I found this to be pretty funny
ha…looks like you all are having fun @ work…that’s the job most of us need after we get out of school… hats off to the teams…
mind if we just come on take your kid to work day and play… we can pretend you adopted all of us
great job again… i have to leave my mom’s vex kit at home 
They all look great! I love the Swerve-bot.
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)
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