At least we found a use for those printable mecanum wheels!

That is badass

the advantage of BallP’s drive system over BallBot’s is that the BallP can spin on its vertical axis. for the purposes of navigating through halls or carrying a load alone, this is probably not useful. But doing the tandem load carrying thing with other BallPs or a human the ability to spin on axis would be quite useful.

I like!!!

3 points always make a plane. With your plane being defined by the ball circumference, the actual gradient of the terrain your ‘bot is on is now fairly irrelevant.

It doesn’t matter what the slope is because it’s simply manipulating the ball to keep it steady against gravity (which it does to move anyway), and not worrying about balancing on the slope as well.

With a ball that’s bigger than your stair hypotenuse (to avoid bouncing), stairs would also be a fairly trivial exercise. You could probably add in some suspension and dampening on the wheels to get the same effect for larger stairs or rough terrain.

I can see this being very practical where moving industrial sized equipment with trucks is difficult through tight fit areas. using this with a gps system you can move very large objects with even more precision than a truck would be able to move said object.

The world’s most agile gurney. To the morgue in style!

@TJ,

The problem with stairs is that there are a lot of types, making the ball larger will make the whole contraption larger. For my wheel chair example, that could mean that the chair + rider would no longer fit through a door. I use wheel chairs as an example mostly because i feel that all of them would not be what i would want in mine, if i needed one later in life.

A compressible gas filled ball would take care of a lot of the suspension problems. If you had more than one of these under a chair it wouldn’t need the auto balancing system like this one. You should also be able to use this system as a way to track movement, by measuring the amount of change the omni-wheels move, and doing the same math you use to make controlled movements.

Ahhhh, so THAT’s how those single-wheeled chairs and robots worked in the Jetsons…

That thing would make the coolest 1 “wheel” motorcycle EVER! (Or a Dalek’s butt!)

1: Now they need to teach it to juggle and/or jump through a hoop of fire.

2: Anyone else get the urge to stand on 2 of them and ride them around like roller-stilts?

3: Think they can handle being stacked on top of each other? Especially after teaching the top one to juggle and the bottom one to roll across a tightrope?

4: Is the name E-Circus trademarked yet?

Err, just to clarify there: Point 1 was referring to the jumping, not the juggling. I was thinking of the bot leaping off the ball and landing on the ground :S

I was just thinking of this same idea earlier today while tearing apart an old ball mouse to get the rotary encoders. What if they made one a lot smaller, say the size of a ball point pen. Sure the printer already exists, but it would be cool having a “magic pen” that writes whatever you tell it to. You just need this same concept on a far smaller scale and an ink dispenser that pours the ink on the ball with a solenoid valve. I’m thinking about trying this with a mouse ball.

One of the main strategies of this layout vs. the 2 wheel standard segway layout is that it is holonomic, meaning that it can instantaneously move in any direction. I heard once that segway built a similar device… imagine an indoor segway that could fit through doors. However, the draw back is that you only have one point contact with the ground . So if you lose contact, say by driving over uneven terrain or a slippery surface the chances for catastrophic imbalance are very high relative to 2 wheel balancing devices, like the segway, which have some redundancy.

Take three Stark Industries Arc Reactor’s and add a robot… I am all over this.

I also thought of the cars from iRobot. Maybe with an off-vertical setup, it would be possible. Or, more than 3 control points. Or, primary vs secondary control points. For example, 2 control points in contact with the ball, and a third to swivel direction of rotation. With the proper application, this could easily be converted to control a 2+ “ball” vehicle in all directions. If the control points handled the role of the suspension, this is very feasible… IMO.

Just some thoughts

dont u guys think he wasted his time building the other two??

incredible design, i can’t imagine how do they programming on that stuff.

@spacemonkey, in the linked article they mention ballbot.

all i can think of is lemmy koopa