Re: Best Drive Train
 

Similarly if 6wd swerve has 100% chance of making it to Einstein I'm sure 8wd swerve would win. ;)


For us on 3467 its 6wd all the way! Its simple, easy to build/maintain, provides great maneuverability/speed, and is extremely reliable. I'm sure down the road we will experiment with fancier systems but this fall we will work to refine our 6wd on a custom level that is better, lighter, and more reliable than any of our prior drive systems.

Re: Best Drive Train
 

Where is the warp drive?

Re: Best Drive Train
 

It's why next year, we're building a Triple Killough. :ahh:

Re: Best Drive Train
 

One drive train that is not thought of a lot is no drive train at all.

Re: Best Drive Train
 

I'd love to, but first, I think I need to figure out just what that means...

Nine swerve pods, each with an octacanum rocker, and an extra set of sideways omniwheels?

Re: Best Drive Train
 

Fixed it for you. ;)

Swerve is hard to beat in terms of agility if you do this. It'll par on durability and has a lot of benefits on pushing force and will get you most any speed you want, though if you're talking about shifting it's considerably harder than slapping a Super Shifter on a tank drive.

Re: Best Drive Train
 

Here is a ranking my team made:

We picked 6WD shifting WCD for our strategy, and we couldn't have been successful in our strategy without it. Not only was it maneuverable, fast, and strong, but it also cleared out a ton of extra room inside the chassis.

Re: Best Drive Train
 

I would think a drive base would be worth the extra 20pts for dumping and the slightly more adaptive strategy (hybrid climb/defense)...

Re: Best Drive Train
 

I don't want to get into technicalities because although I understand the different drives, I only have experience with tank drives (I also can't elaborate at the moment, I would be happy to do so tomorrow if you want), but I will say I have participated in many competitions, built atleast seven robots for different games, and designed for many others I didn't participate in, but I have never encountered a situation where a tank drive couldn't do the jub efficiently and easily, not even in 2010 that was a classic year for holonomic drives (IMO).

Re: Best Drive Train
 

What about fan-bots?

On a more serious note, I have seen very very very few years where a good 6 WD dropped center drive won't do well in a game. It's easy to do, a lot of people have done it, and it just frees up so much time to deal with the rest.

Re: Best Drive Train
 

Our team is really small. We have at the most 15 people. Most of the those people do not come every day and work for all the time so we had to decide to do one thing. My team chose to climb. We ended up spending close to half of our build season building a pyramid corner so that we could corner climb. With a week left we decided to scrap the idea and build a 20 point side climber. Those pictures are of our first legal climb to 20.

I know what you are talking about. In my team I was a huge advocate for not doing a climber because I thought a climber (without a drive train) was an all or nothing approach. I was really surprised and happy that this year in competition we were the 8th seed alliance captain which is the best we have ever done.

There are good things about having a really small team. This year is my freshman year. My team also does FTC where I was one of the hardest working people. Because of that I was able to be the sole operator of our robot. It for me was a great experience.

Re: Best Drive Train
 

Straight up Six Wheel Tank will work every time. If you have time/space/weight/money, adding a two speed shifter is a great way to spice up a tank drive for more versatility. Throw in some roughtop tread and #35 chain for the drive, and you can fight it out with the best of 'em. Two speeds and decent traction will let you overcome most defenders with easy. There is no reason to waste time on a swerve or other drive, though omni-wheel rockers on a 4 wheel setup are also very effective and cool. In my opinion, finish the tank early rather than spending time on a swerve and get more driving practice.

Swerve is cool and all, but it isn't necessary. There was only 1 swerve on Einstein this year. And the winning alliance was all tank. Because it works

Re: Best Drive Train
 

I felt that our Butterfly Drive Module was extremely effective this year. We could go fast with omni's (15fps) and also drop down to traction mode (which we really enjoyed playing with because of the pneumatics) to push robots, mentors, members, and pyramids (although our robot usually lost).

Last year, we were the team with the Innovative Swerve Drive Module. This was one of the lightest and most compact modules out there. Although we never got time to train our drivers with it, we tend to not recommend it to other teams with the issues we experienced with it, although we like to see what other teams innovate on existing swerve drives. Feel free to check out our CD post on our swerve drive, which has had lots of discussion.

Re: Best Drive Train
 

We like our 6-wheel tank drive that we've used in some form or another since 2010.

2010: Long Kit Bot frame. Wedgetop wheels in center. Omni-wheels in the corners. 4 Toughboxes with One CIM each powering each of the back 4 wheels.

2011: Long Kit Bot frame. Plaction roughtop wheels in center. Omni wheels in corners. 2 CIMple boxes with 2 CIMs each powering center wheels only.

2012: Wide Kit Bot frame. Plaction roughtop wheels in center. Omni wheels in corners. 2 CIMple boxes with 2 CIMs each powering back 4 wheels.

2013: 29*25 Kit Bot frame. Plaction roughtop wheels in the rear. Omni wheels in the front. 2 Kit Toughbox Minis with one CIM each powering rear wheels only. (I know there's only 4 wheels this year, but the design was inspired by our success the 6 wheel drivetrains in the past.)

Omni-wheels mean you can spin in a circle with no issues. It's about as maneuverable as you can get without a Swerve drive, Holonomic or Mecanum, with way more traction than Holonomic or Mecanum, and I'd argue Swerve as well and it blows them all away in speed and ease of building/programming.

That said, I agree that there is no one drivetrain that works every time. You might want Swerve if and when we get a maze game.

Re: Best Drive Train
 

And don't forget about 6wd swerves!