Re: pic: Omnibot
 

Reduce weight, yes, but 3-wheel setups have to be carefully thought out. I can only think of 4 off the top of my head: 330 (2002) had a triangular robot and no omnis; 67 (2005) had a peculiar triangular setup that I don't quite remember, but it involved flopping down; 16 (2006) had a 3-wheel swerve with pads to keep the frame from hitting the carpet and digging in, and 148 (2008) had a 3-wheel swerve patterned off of 118's V6 and a much smaller robot than the other three. The only one of those that involved omnis was 67's, IIRC. I remember hearing that 67's drive code took up an awful lot of room on their controller...

More stability is debatable. If you've got it fully in a square or circle, possibly. But with a frame like this, I don't think so. You've got a big risk that one corner will go down and dig into the carpet.

Speed might not be affected. I'd have to do the vectors to figure that out, and I'm not in a position to do that right now...

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

Im almost completely positive 67 in 2005 was a 3 wheel swerve with no omni's involved.

you can see the front two wheels here : http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/20772

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

857 did a 3 wheel omni, or "kiwi drive," in 2002

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/13495

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

Right now its just a design but who knows I may just get to build one.:yikes:

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

I'm pretty sure it was a kiwi-type system, like below. I tried to search, but no luck yet.

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

Nope, sorry Eric, but 67 definitely had a 3 wheeled crab in 2005.

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

Actually, I found a picture... of 67 2005... in a match... on two wheels, showing the third. NOT a true swerve. Swerve, yes. Three wheeled robot, yes. But not a three-wheel swerve. One wheel steered, three drove. Zoom in on the picture. One wheel is turned; the others appear not to be able to.

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

:rolleyes: Actually, I found a picture... of 67 in 2005...during build... on the ground, showing all three wheels. A true swerve, with all three wheels able to rotate.

No hard feelings eric :P

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

If you move the wheels to opposite corners the math will work out exactly the same as it would for the configuration shown.

There are two advantages that a holonomic base built using this configuration has over a swerve drive:

1) The modules are lighter and less complex.
2) The robot can translate and rotate at the same time (I've seen this called "frisbee motion")

The programming is more complex, but there are plenty of examples available to get you started.

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

And rotate independently... No wonder the code took so much space in the controller.

Back on topic: If you're going to do 3WD, plan it out first. Carefully. As noted, only one robot (to our knowledge) has had a 3WD omni system; most of the other 3WDs were crab/swerve systems.

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

Also, the one robot that did a 3 wheeled omni (857) didn't use code to control their wheels, they used hardware (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/16410) Dont forget that sometimes that solution works better than complex code. No reason to make the code more complex than it needs to be. Could it be done in code? Yes, is complex code always better? That is up to you.

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

Cooool, are those the robots that spin really really fast??:yikes:

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

Hi
I like the design. Both my team(852) and an alliance partner at Davis 2144 built bots like this. They work well but can be a challenge to program. autonomous is almost impossible without a well coded gyro. Anyways give it a try and see what happens. That is what we did.
Julian

Re: pic: Omnibot
 

Kiwi drive/Killough platforms are generally not any more stable than the 4-wheel holonomic drives. The arc lengths between wheels are larger than for the 4-wheels, meaning more area to tip. As for spacing the wheels out of a perfect square, yes, it works, but buy moving them out one more inch, you will require code of much greater complexity because of the angle calculations you will have to use to get the same effect. With the new control system, that shouldn't be a problem memory and speed wise, but it's just more things to crash in the program. Nice design, it's pretty!