The OmniCar exists in a future overpopulated world. It serves the function of allowing the driver to avoid other drivers and people with its agile maneuverability. The original idea for the OmniCar was to have three spherical drive wheels. We redesigned the OmniCar because we realized that getting the three powered wheels to be coordinated would be nearly impossible to accomplish in two weeks. We decided on one large wheel because the car would work just as well with one drive wheel and it would not require complex coordination. Along with the original three wheeled design, we were going to have an accelerometer in the palm of our hand and a knob to turn for throttle control. We changed this design slightly, and excluded the knob and instead just kept the accelerometer. The direction and speed are now controlled by tilting the glove that the electronics are attached to. We left the car uncovered to show the drive wheel and how it works.
The next thing that we would do is improve the drive wheel to increase the speed and to improve the stepper motor that we used to turn the gears to give it better functionality. One of our biggest challenges was that we spent a lot of our time designing parts that would later become unnecessary. Another big challenge that we faced was that the stepper motor did not turn the drive motor to the correct angle because it did not have enough torque to overcome the resistance of the gears.