Mirosot Soccer Robots

I was an active member of the San Francisco Robotics Society of America when I lived in San Francisco. A friend of mine, who was also the president of the club started running annual robotics events, which eventually turned into competitions. One competition that he wanted to have at his events was called mirosot. This is robot soccer played with robots that are a little larger than your fist. I decided to get together a team of people to compete in that event. My part of it was the design and most of the construction and assembly of the robots themselves. We decided to build a holonomic drive platform that could drive in any direction at any time and had three 'omniwheels' to allow it to do just that. We couldn't find any omniwheels small enough so I ended up designing my own. We managed to build about 30 omniwheels and it was a huge amount of work but in the end, they worked out great. I designed and built the circuit boards for the robots and wrote the software to drive the wheels. In the end, I had several functional robots that could drive around in pre-programmed patterns. They had radio receivers so that they could receive instructions from a host computer but my other teammates weren't able to make any real progress with their strategy and computer vision software so that is how they ended up. Recently, I gained possession of these robots again and hope to rework them so that they can at least drive around under remote control.

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