Who had the coolest wheels?
 

alright, I know team 151 had really robust wheels(plus they looked soo sweet!!!), I just wanted to know if you saw our wheels, and if you saw any others that were any cooler?


badjokeguy

i don't know how cool ours are in relation to yours, but i'll still brag about them :) basically, our front wheels are monsters, they're 8 inches wide and 8 inches in diameter (I nicknamed 'em square wheels since they're 8 by 8 :D) we have conveyer belt traction around them, and they look very imposing. the back wheels are our omni wheels (basically a powered caster, with pretty darn decent traction). the rollers are compressed lexan, with ridges to better dig into the carpet. Tom, you got any pictures you can show?

Stephen

our wheels were pretty bangin... they didn't look like the BEST wheels, but when u banged em together.. they resonated at this REALLY REALLY high pitch and made people run away.. they were fun

118 had a total of eight wheels on the robot - six wheel drive plus the mini me's two wheels.

They were machined out of aluminum, and the six base wheels together weighed a total of two pounds. The outside edge was knurled for traction, but when that proved to be insufficent, we added some non-slip belt.

Personally, I liked 624's five wheels. Very grippy, but big enough so that they didn't hurt the carpet.

Beat this
 

4 wheels 6 inch diameter machined of solid aluminum, with speciallty mounts for a sprocket on the side. They were hard to see under our armor but everyone who saw them was impressed. We're thinkin bout making them 20" for next year to ride on dubs :cool:

Did you get a look at 343 Metal in Motion's wheels? We had 6 main wheels each with 16 smaller wheels arranged at 90 degrees to the direction of rotation. That's 102 wheels in all. We called them unidirectional wheels because they only generate force in one direction. Four of the wheels were used to drive forward and back and the other two set 90 degrees from the those to drive side to side. Our control system allowed two modes of operation. The first worked like a tank drive with the assist of the side to side wheels for turning. The other mode ( activated by a button on the joy stick) allowed us to move independently front to back and side to side. This scheme made it nearly impossible to pin us and gave us a nifty advantage moving the goals around.

Personally I liked 811's wheels. Two really tall wheels on either side. Gave us great speed and traction both.

wheels? what are wheels?

/me pets Fluffy and admires her treads

George
SPAM
Team 180

huge wheels!!!
 

Well as far as size there was team at Grand Rapids(WMR) that had 2 huge wheels but i cant remember their name. The wheels were wood I believe about 3'(well not quite) in diameter and painted black with a belting material around it. I couldn't find a pic but I'm sure someone knows who I'm talking about. Also both team hot(67) and team 322 from UoM flint had nicely machined rims. 322 had spokes while hot had flames.

Well, if your going to talk about roller wheels, I guess we gotta give credit to the Baxter Bombsquad since they were the ones that started the whole roller wheel thing. My personal vote goes for BBS, and team 48 for their unique wheel which had gear teeth facing inward kind of like planetary gears.

I'm kinda partial to my team's wheels. They are machined out of 6" aluminum stock, with a sprocket mount on one side and belting for tread on the outside. They are also polished, and look so cool. You can see a good shot of our wheels (and robot, too) in this picture.

PS: Doesn't our 'bot look so intimidating in this picture?

our wheels were cool..... untill we used them. fell apart like we had nothing holding them together. I guess the apoxie and screws and staples weren't enough :D oh well. we still got 8th in Archimedes even with our crappy traction :)

339 wheels
 

I think I liked our front wheels the best. We had one of the seniors on the team design omnicasters for the front and then had them machined. It took about 1 hour to assemble all of the mini rollers and bolts, but the zero-turning radius was nice.

The best wheels are treads!

The technocats, team 45 have sweet custom treads, make of metal cleats on a chain.

They were some good pictures a while back, suffice to say they don't have traction difficulties:D . They can tell you more, though, and if you go to their site(at least when I went), you could see some movies of their robot in action. In the background, you can here the drive train. Sounds like a M134 chaingun on an apache winding up:D

Great job 45!

45 Intimidation Picture....
 

Thanks for the compliment Ben...

Being the 2nd year we've done treads like this, they year was probably best this year...


Here's a picture of the treads and an "intimidation shot" all in one :)

Team 100. We had really cool wheels with pneumatic tires. Traction was very good. You can drop the pressure and get more traction, or air them up and get lots more speed.

OMNI WHEELS :)


Manuverability of casters, traction of sharp metal things digging into the carpet.

I stopped and admired SPAM's drive and tread setup in Fla. What a bad dude setup!! nice work!! Also, for those of you who attended MMR and the WMR, 857 had the coolest setup! They are the guys using the chasis which has the wheels clocked at 120 deg and uses 3 separate joysticks connected together for control. As mannuverable as the crabbers and not as complicated. Can't wait to see what else the guys at RoboWerx have up their sleeve!:) Also, 67 the HOT team had some really sweet looking NC'd Flamers!!:cool:

Re: 45 Intimidation Picture....
 

Couple questions regarding treads as they are not a familiar thing to me.

First, do you ever notice any trouble turning? Circuit breakers tripping or motors heating or anything?

Second, specific to your design, what is that optical sensor for???

- Patrick

I think team 67 Hot bot had some Sweet wheels. They had flames CNC'd into them they look nice. Our rats wheels that we CNC'd out of wood looked sweet rolling (Chrome Rims:D :D ) But of course someone was smart enough to knock it off of the table and break the wheel so swe had to go to wheel chair wheels.



Andrew

Patrick....
 

Turning can be difficult with threads if you dont do 1 or 2 things....

On the bottom of our robots we had a idlers that the chain ran against and these idlers had a slight "curve" to them...

Never had any problems with this design of tread...




The optical sensor was part of the "Traction Control" we had that we never used....

Re: Patrick....
 

Oh well, it was a learning experiance :)

Team 547 - Wheels built from scratch
 

We experimented with cleats this year. We built some prototype wheels and even a test jig with spring scales for testing traction. We ultimately settled on the cleated design you see in the picture. The wheels are 3 layers of 1/2" plywood with 1/2" C-channel aluminum for the cleats. They were definitely above average on traction but not as good as those beast machines. We could easily be pushed around sideways. We will probably try something else next year.

Our wheels:

Re: Patrick....
 

Not true

it was used a little bit, then the wire for the sensor was ripped, after it was repaired we used it once more and then it was turned off..

Hey did anyone see team 25's wheels

we had wheels w/ a 9in dia. and 4in wide we then

ground them flat and cut a criss cross pattern

our sponors called them carpet meshers (thats what they did)




AND REMEMBER IF IT AIN'T F.I.R.S.T WATER IT AIN'T WATER