Holonomic Battlebot

Always eager to get back into robot combat, I found a guy (I can't remember his name or find it online) who had already built a robot prototype that had a holonomic drive train that could be configured to use either three or four drive wheels. He found that he wasn’t able to get the control that he was looking for using standard remote control equipment so was looking for me to make some custom electronics and software for it. I designed a controller for the robot and modified a PC joystick to become a transmitter so that I could control it. This robot was definitely the most fun to play with out of everything else that I had built up to that point. My software allowed it to drive around with either three wheels oriented 120 degrees from each-other or with four wheels oriented at 90 degrees from each-other. During my testing and for a couple of weeks afterwards, I drove it around the roads near the house that I was living in. This robot really didn’t have any particular side that needed to be the front since it could drive in any direction at any time. The big arrow that you see in the picture was put on after I was testing on the road and a car came along. I ended up dodging in the wrong direction and steered it directly into the path of the car. The car drove over it! Fortunately, this was a prototype chassis for a Battlebot so it was still completely functional afterwards and I kept on testing after the car left.

The prototype sat at my place for a couple of months after I was done with it. They guy that I was working with wasn't in a hurry to get it back. At the time he had run out of money or time or something like that and wasn't able to continue working on the robot. I had figured that he had never done anything with it but I looked into it when making this web page and found out that he eventually did use what I came up with and competed with it. It won one match and lost one match.