It’s based on a ball spinning perpendicular to the floor, which is pivoted to move in any direction with any acceleration. Any vex applications?
I know someone who’s CADDing and building one(User 1). ;]. And I plan to be the second. Awesome drive. I think it can be done.
-Dave
the first time i have ever heard of such a concept and i LIKE IT!
may be hard to implement in vex and/or even in gateway
but it will still be an awesome showcase if anyone can build one and bring it to worlds 
I want one, I want one, I WANT ONE!!! And yes I’m CADing this right now.
First thought: That is WAY COOL!
Second thought: I wish we had a VEX ball.
Third thought: Why is this more desirable than omni or crab drive?
//Andrew
This reminds me of the cars in the movie I, Robot. It would be awesome if we could eventually be driving something like that.
There is actually quite a bit going on there. here is what I took from it after looking at this for the past few weeks (it has been popping up on tons of forums)
The ball actually acts as its own transmission because as the module tilts the ball also tilts, therefore at the start of the tilt the part of the ball touching the floor is close to the original neutral point (torque-y but not super speedy) then as the tilt increases the contact portion of the ball is farther from the neutral point making it less torque-y but very fast this has a lot to do with this robots ability to accelerate so quickly.
I believe by changing the hemisphere to another dome shape you could actually change this transmission effect to better suit the robot.
The ball can spin all the time. there is no need to stop the ball then start it again in the other direction in order to change direction, notice how quickly the robot can just zip forward and then immediately back.
You only REALLY need one of these modules to drive a robot.
It is wicked cool. Huge style points.
Now I’m not sure I think this is something that is worth scaling up to FRC size (as a few members of CD are talking about) or even to Vex size based on the parts that we have but it sure is cool. And i would love to see someone try it out and show it off at worlds (on of off the fields)
~DK
Hey i was thinking about this design and would it me possible to use this in gateway.
Like your preload can be the ball you move with. second you can control the ball through the whole match and use another mechanism to score to the gateway ball it the main ball applicaton.
Is this possible?
Let me know
A few issues I see there.
You have to be able to spin the ball, in the video it looked like the ball had a shaft sticking out of it which made it possible to spin it.
That would also be a HUGE drive module.
And I’m not sure you really want to trust the game object to be spherical… they are good but they certainly aren’t perfect.
Prototype it though see if you can make it work because it you can and you bring it to worlds for us to see that would be worth a cookie or something 
~DK
just another issue i see, how much batts would this thing eat up per match?
i remember in clean sweep, 10D had a “baseball pitcher” spinners that were spinning for the entire match
they ate up 2 3000mah batts in a match…
How far are you?
I remember a similar CAD rendering here years ago, with 4 egg shaped wheels that changed orientations for variable speed, (but not direction).
Look at the downsides:
- requires two orientation motors for the one driving motor.
- If DK puts only one on a robot, I predict that the rotation orientation of the robot to the field will be poorly controlled.
- it could drill-melt a divot in the vexfoam field when idling, or cause the robot to rotate in opposite direction.
- Requires ground-sensing closed-loop feedback to operate well during Autonomous period.
On the upside, if you can get it working, its probably worth an award of some kind, and you’d learn a lot.
OMG I thought of this in my robotics class at school but there was no real way to do it. I just kind of let it go because it seemed not feasible to do. Out of curiosity though, could you use the vex objects as part of your robot’s mechanical design? Like, say take one of the vex balls this year and use that? Obviously not the best for the job but I was just wondering if that’s legal
Check Apertures latest thread, Ignore half the stuff in the middle just go to the end and click the link I posted
- Andrew
What thread?
im not sure if this was said but for the ball could you possibly use a game element from a previous competition or even this years??
ya, i asked as well. so far no word as to whether it’s legal.
No this would definitely not be legal.
He’s referring to this thread:
https://vexforum.com/t/apertures-cading-again/19308/1&page=2
Primarily post #18
-Nick
what if you managed to have it become part of the robot after the match had started? like it somehow attached itself and became a part of the robot?
I could see VEX having a problem with this maybe. Even if they didn’t though I really don’t see an advantage to this and also the ball is 6" in diameter. That would be huge to us on a VEX drive train.