This is a robot using omniwheels. Normal wheels can only turn in one direction, but omniwheels are able to drive in all directions due to small rollers. These rollers have their axis perpendular on de main axis of the wheel. In this robot I used omniwheels by Nexus Robot.

Xander Soldaat (Bot Bench) gives a good explanation in his article about omniwheels. I used his article to built this robot. The robot is programmed by using the MonoBrick Communication Library. When starting the application on your computer the userinterface shows several buttons.

Controlling the robot is done by these buttons. Ev3 needs to be connected by Bluetooth. The Bluetooth port (e.g. com4) must be given in the ini-file which resides in the same directory as the executable. By pressing ‘Forward’ the robot goes straight forward. When pressing ‘Go Left’ the robot moves to the left but keeps the same orientation. In other words, it slides to the left. When pressing one of the ‘Turn’ buttons, the robot turns around on its place, thus its orientation changes. By using the sliders the driving speed or the speed in which it turns can be adjusted (range 0 to 100). The ‘Start Searching’ button makes EV3 turn around to find the beacon. When found, the robots starts driving to the beacon. As you can see in the video, some adjustment needs to be done here: of course it has to stop in front of the beacon.

Download the LEGO Digital Designer file here.