The robot in the video is Kiwi Drive, developed by Malmo’s Hakerspace (Forsknings Avdelningen) in a total time of 1,5 weeks. The crew started assembling it at a hackathon we held at our FabLab in February and the robot got the honor of presenting the official opening of our brand new space to the public on March 31st. I runs on a laptop an includes an Arduino Uno to control the motors.

Once the project began design stage we realized that focusing on making it easy for others to reproduce was a good idea. Therefore we choose to use nothing but standard components. Nema 23 stepper motors and drivers are standard, cheap and common due to the increase in DIY CNC and Reprap manufacturing. The Arduino Uno is available across the world. We also only use metric standard components (sorry about that US) such as M5 threaded rods and M4, M3 screws for the smaller components.

Omnidirection wheels however are not exactly standard components, but given the simplicity of the drive mechanism it would be very easy to adapt the design for other wheels and shafts of a similar size. We have also made sure it is easy to re-design the drawings to account for other types of motors and bearings and we’ve left significant space (length-wise) for larger motors and gearboxes.

(c) 2011 courtesy of Forsknings Avdelningen

Find more information about Kiwi Drive on it’s official development wiki, also take a look at this hilarious post by the Hackerspace members about moving their offices to Malmo’s City Hall.