Designing Drive Trains

By Tycho

Task: Create preliminary designs for a new robot using a new build platform

After we got the new mechanum wheels, I had to start thinking about a new design that would be able to use them.

Reflections

Not much progress was done on the design based on the mecanum wheels, but I remade part of the design based on our old robot from previous years. We will build one robot based on our proven omniwheel-drivewheel-omniwheel nacelle design, only using the REV extrusion building system being sold by Andymark. We will build a second robot using mecanum wheels. The plan is to see which robot works better and that will become our competition robot and the other will become our sparring partner. We think that our classic design will be better at pushing and resisting being pushed around. We also know it is very capable of accurate turning. But the mecanum robot will have more freedom of movement. Which should work better is probably dependent on what the challenge looks like when they release it. But we are also new to mecanum and probably won't have a rock solid implementation figured out right away.