The holonomic drive robot takes it's first rolls! This is what you get when you contort a 3d printer into a cross format and attach funky wheels. Quite literally as the control board is an Arduino Mega board with Atmel 2650 MCU and a RAMPS 1.4 stepper controller board plugged into it. The show is controlled over rf24 link from a hand made controller. Yes folks, a regression to teleoperating for now. I'll have to throw the thing onto scales later, but the steppers themselves add considerable weight to the project, but there doesn't seem to be much problem moving the thing around under it's own power.
The battery is a little underspeced, it will surely supply enough current, and doesn't get hot after operation, but the overall battery capacity is low so the show is over fairly quickly. A problem that is easily solved by throwing more dollars at the battery. The next phase is to get better mechanical stability by tweaking things and changing the software to account for the fact that one wheel axis is longer than the other. From there some sensor feedback (IMU) and a fly by wire mode will be on the cards.
This might end up going into ROS land too, encapsulating the whole current setup into being a "robot base controller" and using other hardware above to run sensors, navigation, and decision logic.
