Last year we wanted the pushing power of 6WD but the maneuverability of mecannum so we came up with this.
The middle wheels in the video are white wheels that can slide. This was before we had out middle wheel s manufactured.
The actual wheel were 8inch diameter by 2 inch wide CNCed aluminum wheels with roughtop threads.
To be able to travel sideways the middle wheels were lifted off the ground 1/4 of an inch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5vBpImX8Ds
and also this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVtHI...eature=related
Meccanum is great in my opinion but it needs some semi-intelligent programming.
in 2010 we had a gyro on the robot that did 2 things:
1, to stop the robot from spinning when it was not desired. (robot kept its direction even if pushed by other robots)
2, pushing the joystick forward in mecannum mode always meant the robot travels away from the driver no matter what orientation it was in.
We also had the vision system that on demand, kept the robot pointed at the target and the driver could translate freely.