James Bruton's Omni-Directional Conveyance
This novel vehicle uses three spheres to travel in any direction.
Normal wheeled vehicles travel forwards and backwards, while those that use properly oriented omni wheels can also slide side-to-side and spin. James Bruton's new craft, which resembles a sort of completely re-imagined wheelchair, utilizes an even more unusual locomotion arrangement of three spheres. This sphere concept, inspired by a project at Osaka University, slides and turns in a similar manner to omni-wheeled craft.
The trick to this vehicle's movement is that each sphere is split into two freely rotating hemispheres. These are powered perpendicularly to their axis of free rotation, via a trio of Turnigy Aerodrive 6374 149kV brushless DC motors and a belt drive gearbox. There's also a skateboard wheel at the peak of each hemisphere to allow it to roll when the peak is downward facing.
An Arduino Uno provides onboard control for the device, along with an nRF24L01 radio unit that functions as the user interface. Such a setup means that Bruton can sit on it and drive, or summon it from a remote location.
One might question whether or not this throne can actually support and transport its creator. Bruton proves this out at around the 12:30 mark in the build video below, and actually found it to be "terrifyingly high powered" due to the powerful 1500 watt motors used, plus the 3:1 gearbox. Of course, getting used to such a novel means of locomotion has to add to its terrifying and/or fun factor.
This isn't Bruton's first experiment with a novel transportation device. We featured his omni-wheeled bicycle here, which required him to largely forget what he knows about riding a two-wheeled vehicle