How It Balances on ONE Omni-Wheel

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Last time I tried to make a robot which balanced on one actively-driven two-axis omni-wheel. This wheel is driven by two motors in a differential drive configuration so it can drive sideways as well as forwards and backwards like a normal wheel.
The design was mostly taken from a Honda Patent and Honda had showcased a proof-of-concept machine called the U3-X. The original design showed all the wheels around the circumference being driven together by a flexible shaft, but this is very hard to reproduce, so in my version I just attached all of the wheels to a central hub.
Those wheels are driven by two hubs with rollers mounted on them at 45 degrees. This causes the wheels to rotate as the hubs are turned in opposite directions on either side. It worked well during low-speed testing, but I couldn’t get enough traction while accelerating fast to make the device balance. This was largely down to slippage between the rollers on the hubs and the wheels around the circumference. There’s also quite a lot of friction between all of the rollers and wheels, so it’s probably not very efficient.
I’d also looked at another wheel design called OmBURo. This robot uses helical gears to translate the motion to drive the wheels around the circumference with a motor mounted in line with the main wheel axis. This design uses shorter flexible shafts so that each helical gear drives three wheels, although I guess more helical gears could be added, so there’s one for each small wheel.
This time I decided to make something totally different, using a twisted belt to translate the motion from a central hub to the small wheels around the circumference.

CAD and Code: https://github.com/XRobots/ActiveOmni...

Links:
   • OmBURo: A Novel Unicycle Robot with A...  
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.07856.pdf
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8...

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XROBOTS

Former toy designer, current YouTube maker and general robotics, electrical and mechanical engineer, I’m a fan of doing it yourself and innovation by trial and error. My channel is where I share some of my useful and not-so-useful inventions, designs and maker advice. Iron Man is my go-to cosplay, and 3D printing can solve most issues - broken bolts, missing parts, world hunger, you name it.

XRobots is the community around my content where you can get in touch, share tips and advice, and more build FAQs, schematics and designs are also available.