How It Balances on ONE Omni-Wheel

AD Start your free trial to Altium Designer for 15 days: 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 be