ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Do you have what it takes to put a robot on the Moon? Can you answer ' Why We Should Go Back to the Moon for Good? ' Do you want to win a trip to Hawaii and other great prizes? Then register a team and get going! Reed the rules and keep an eye on the FAQ page , as that will help you to win. Do you want to see more about the Google Lunar Xprize .

RJ McNamara has been working on a very nice look quad motor holonomic drive platform.  No videos yet but plenty of great pitcures (and CAD renders) of his setup. He has three different versions, 2 with 4xPF motors and one with 4xNXT motors.  The NXT one uses the Mindsensors Motor Multiplexer to control them all.  He also has spaced 4 Ultrasonic sensors around, and checks the readings one at a time to minimise interference from the others. At the end of each motor is 2 RotoCaster omnidrive wheels (That's right, 8 in total!) Lots and lots of great pictures, as well as the full LDD cad designs for anyone who wants to download them. http://www.rjmcnamara.com/2012/04/quad-drive-holomonic-platform/

During the days around New Year, I have performed a finger exercise in LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT Steampunk: the Wonderful Steam NXT . It can be built with a single NXT 2.0 set and three Rotacaster® wheels: A  Rotacaster®  wheel allows for movement in two directions; they are produced and sold by the Australian  Rotacaster®  company and compatible to LEGO®.  For the Wonderful Steam NXT, Rotacaster sponsored three of them (Thanks, Rotacaster!) , which enables it to turn on the spot. I like these wheels a lot - they are reliable, very useful for building holonomic mobile robots (have a look at previous posts on our blog for further examples of NXT robots equipped with them) and last but not least look cool. Update: Building instructions for the vehicle can be found on my web site .

In his Rotacaster-Robot series, Xander Soldaat has created an Omniwheel vehicle that can be built with the pieces in one NXT 2.0 kit, and three omni-wheels . A video, the NXT-G source code and LDD building instructions can be dowloaded from his blog ( link ).

Here are some cool videos to follow up on Jim's post about these great new wheels from Rotacaster. By sparramc: A Lego Mindstorms NXT Autonomous Quad Rotacaster Killough Platform Omni-Bot By xandersoldaat: Rotacaster Test 2 (visit his blog for other test videos) By bazmarc: LEGO Space Police Sentinel - Rotacaster - Mindstorms The official page to find more info on these Next Generation Holonomic Robot Wheels by Rotacaster can be found here:  http://www.rotacaster.com.au/robot-wheels.html