This week we got to see the first Human Transportation Vehicle (HTV) almost entirely made out of LEGO parts - Yeah, there are a dozen Rotacaster multi-directional wheels in there!
It took the form of a real-life size wheelchair and it is capable of transporting a 90Kg person around, using just LEGO MINDSTORMS and a load of LEGO Technic elements, plus those nice LEGO compatible wheels. 
This project was made by Simon Burfield (Burf2000), who once said he will take over the world with LEGO. 
Below you can see a demonstration on how it performs with Simons' wife on the controls. Hence not at full load... 
The project itself features a huge amount of good stuff...
- 7 NXT Bricks
- 14 LEGO MINDSTORMS Motors
- 16 LEGO MINDSTORMS Touch Sensors
- 12 Rotacaster Multi-directional Wheels
In the current vesion it uses 6 NXT bricks for driving and 1 master NXT for direction control. Each of the driving NXT’s has 2 NXT motors attached to it and 2 touch sensors in the direction control block. The master NXT has 4 touch sensors connected (forward, back, left and right) and 2 extra NXT motors to switch on the drive touch sensors. The whole thing was programmed in RobotC.
Even with 12 wheels and considering no custom steel axles were used in this project, we still have 7,5Kg load on each wheel and 3,75Kg per axle if I understood the gearing correctly from the images available. Impressive!
The photos below help you to understand on how the whole project was realized.
For the original info and more photos, you may refer to Simons' website and flickr account.
Of course, the orange chair was a tribute to TBs
... 
Form Martijn Boogaarts' (Robotica) post at the The NXT STEP this week, we got to know it all started as a bet between Simon and Eric Steenstra also known for his massive LEGO models made among friends.
However this makes it not least interesting to see where the Eric's Trike idea will take him [1, 2, 3].
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1 comment:
As I already mentioned on youtube, I'm very impressed with the resistance of this model. In my experience, axis, and even beams tend to crack very easily under human weight!
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