Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

I am working on a t-shirt shooting robot project. I want to know what type of wheels are the best for driving in the street/on the sidewalk, possibly a gym floor (without scuffing too bad) and rubberized running track. We currently are working with an AM14u 2014 KoP chassis with AM-2256 white rubber wheels (is it possible to swap any other type of wheels out and still use the same chassis?). Is there anything that I could do to modify the wheels to use them on concrete/cement? I've done a bit of research and I apologize if there are any threads already covering this (I searched).

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

I'll answer a later question first: You should be able to swap with any other wheels, GIVEN that they are the same size or that you correct the gearing (if needed). So, if your chassis has 6" wheels, and you have a different set of 6" wheels with the same attachment system ready to go, it's as simple as swapping wheels. If you want to change wheel size, you'll have to account for that in the gearing.

The Hi-Grip wheels that you're talking about will probably be OK for the running track. (Might be too grippy, but that's not too hard to fix.) You should be able to swap for am-2648s with no issues for indoor (gym floor) use. Street/sidewalk, go with a used set of whichever you want to go with.

If you're really tricky about it... you build up a spare set of wheels, complete with sprockets, for the "alternate surface", and have them ready with the robot, so that a swap will take about 10 minutes for all the wheels (OK, so maybe I'm exaggerating... or maybe not!).

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

You could always replace the front/rear pairs of a 6wd with Lunacy wheels if you have some, leaving the middle wheels grippy, since more-than-adequate traction isn't a criteria.

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

I would suggest small pneumatic tires for concrete/gravel/outside. They have a little bit of give to go over small bumps without causing a fuss. If they are too grippy on gym floors or tiles you can wrap them in a small strip of electrical tape to decrease the grippy-ness (for lack of a better word).

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

Colsons work well on concrete, and shouldn't scuff up a basketball court. I've never seen them on a rubberized running track but I wouldn't be overly worried about them. You should be able to swap 4" Colsons from Vex for the AndyMark wheels. Just be sure you get the correct ones for live axle or dead axle.

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

For the gym floor I would probably say plaction/performance wheels with the green tread material. I also think those would be fine for the running track.

(Or, to make things interesting, run it on six lunacy wheels)

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

I don't think a dead axle Colson would fit in the AM14U wheel channel, it'd be too wide. If you machine/purchase some longer churro segments as standoffs for the outer plate, you might be able to make it wor,

Could try just wrapping the current wheels in duct tape.

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

Having personally seen how all of the above wheels (and tapes) fare on all of the aforementioned surfaces, here's a few tips:

1. Don't even think about using any kind of tape as a grip material. You'll either regret it when the tape peels loose and jams your drive mechanism, or when the tape wears away and leaves a nasty sticky coating all over everything. Either way, it never ends well.
2. Everything will eventually wear out if you run it on concrete, with the sole exception of pneumatic tires: those are basically invincible over the kinds of distances that a demo bot can travel in its lifetime. On the other hand, they do cost more upfront, they make long-orientation drivetrains hard to steer, and they require wider-than-normal wheel wells to fit.
3. All of the various replaceable-tread wheels (Plaction, IFI, etc.) are well-known to quickly wear flat outside of a competition environment. If you're ok with bald treads, however, they are suitable for all surfaces: once the treads wear away, their rubber backing is pretty durable, has decent traction, and is non-marking. Taking this path will cost more money than it's worth, however, and the treads do start to look ugly once you've gotten to that point, so you're better off avoiding this category.
4. Slick wheels (the hard white plastic kind that was introduced for the 2009 season) are plenty durable for outdoor use, but they get mangled in the process. They won't "mark" the hardwood floor of a gymnasium, per say, but they will scratch up the floor like a rabid wolverine, so those are off-limits as well.
5. All told, Colsons and AndyMark rubber-tread wheels (or any other hard solid-rubber wheels, for that matter) are probably your best options for this purpose. They will deliver uniform performance across all of the above surfaces, they'll last many years without complaining, and they won't mark or scratch floors when you take them back indoors.

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

I firmly concur with pneumatic tires (in particular AM-0970's due to the simplicity of getting them to work with standard FRC hardware) as the best answer for concrete and most outdoor surfaces. Unless your outdoors has significantly less sand and gravel than the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, don't even think about using the same wheels for indoors and outdoors. (Personally I'd like to carry a spare set of shoes everywhere so I could swap as I walked outside and inside.) You could possibly swap all the wheels every time you move in or out, but we have pretty much opted to have inside robots and outside robots.

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

I can't speak to the 2014 Kitbot because I have never used it, but on 423 we always build our robots so that we can remove the drivetrain from the robot, switch a wheel (or motor, gearbox, etc), and replace it in less than 5 minutes. If you could somehow modify the kitbot to allow for something like this you could get by with only one robot plus an extra set of wheels. (I'm not even going to try to guess at how to do this, I'll leave that up to your team.) That's what we do when we do outside demos and we don't forget to switch wheels (which doesn't happen very often).

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

My vote is for Colsons. Excellent wearability on anything including concrete.

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

The 2014/15 kit robot will never be really quick and easy to change wheels. The quickest way would be to remove about a dozen #10 bolts (some with nuts, some tapped into churros) to lift the side plate on each side, swap the wheels (simple enough if the pulleys and hubs/bearings stay with the wheels), and put it all back together. A much simpler wheel swap would be to do wheels on a cantilevered axle. While it's not why we picked this chassis, our air cannon uses AndyMark nanotubes, which make swapping wheels a breeze: pull one 1/4" lug bolt and washer per wheel, remove the wheel, catch the key, put the key and new wheel on, and replace the lug bolt and washer. It would be even easier with tapped hex shafts, available COTS on VersaPlanetary.

Re: Best type of wheels for concrete/cement?
 

+1 for the advantages of a West Coast Drive; Lightning Robotics has used the VersaChassis for our past two competition bots, and benefited greatly from the ability to swap out a full set of wheels in a matter of minutes.

Among other things, we like to roll around on an old set of wheels for demos, then swap in for a fresh set whenever we go to an off-season competition.