Team 2175 Driving!
 

We're driving! http://vimeo.com/19562627.

This is an implentation of what is called "Slide Drive". We have five 4" omni wheels (doubled up for better floor contact), 4 of which are in typical tank drive arrangement and the last in the middle pointed sideways. This drive train has 3 degrees of freedom (fwd/back, strafe, rotate) and is pretty fast and maneuverable while staying pretty simple. Even over the course of this video we are getting a hang of some of the cool nuances of this thing, and we hope to have regular drive practice to really get at moving around. Read more about it at our blog.

This is always a major achievement, but we still have a ways to go before we have a competitive machine. Gripper, elevator, and minibot all need to be finalized and built.

Re: Team 2175 Driving!
 

Dang, thats a really nice base you guys have. I was actually trying to get my team to go with a similar design but it was outvoted. :P

By the way, don't you lose a lot of traction by using omni-wheels as your main driving wheels?

Re: Team 2175 Driving!
 

More or less as much traction as a mecanum drive, but with more control of how much force is going in which direction.

Nice drive! I'd speed up the kicker a bit personally but it looks like you'll be able to slide around with no problems.

Re: Team 2175 Driving!
 

Exactly. Mecanums also tend to be a bit bumpy because of the interesting roller profile (unless you do it just right). This was also cheaper ;)

Kicker? I'm at a loss for what you meant to say here, although I'm sure it made perfect sense in your mind...

Re: Team 2175 Driving!
 

By "kicker" I meant the sideways wheel - my mistake.

Re: Team 2175 Driving!
 

Heh, yeah I'm always randomly omitting or replacing words subconciously...

We're favoring acceleration on the strafe wheel because we shouldn't be strafing over long distances. However, we can very easily swap out sprockets for a smaller reduction. Right now it's running off 2 CIMs into a CIMple to a 14 to 42 sprocket stage because our Banebots aren't in yet, so we'll have to see how it does with 2 775s in CIMulators...

Re: Team 2175 Driving!
 

This thing is going to be a hanging machine! My team's eyes are gonna be on your robot at Northstar!

Re: Team 2175 Driving!
 

nice job my team had come up with nearly the same idea but then decied against it because we wanted two cims for our arm (which we still got done to one anyways so we could still have done this)

Re: Team 2175 Driving!
 

Wow! I'm guessing this is a defensive robot. Really love how the bot can go side to side.

Re: Team 2175 Driving!
 

It could just be the driving style, but it seems like the robot seems to roll sideways quite a bit after power has been turned off to the slide wheel. Are the electronics set to brake?
(I realize sideways friction is likely far less than forward direction friction, but this still seems like alot of drifting to me)