Quote:
Originally Posted by Duke461
Not to rain on people's parades here, but.....[*]In the second video, the Mecanum's were having a very hard time getting up the bridge (not too sure how it helped Mecanum's case). If anything, it shows that carefully done programming will be required just for your drivetrain.[/list]Please take my criticism in a constructive manner, as I will do the same.
-Duke
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I don't think you're raining on anyone's parade by providing practical advice based on your experience, however the intent of the video I posted was not to show that "it is easy to do", but rather that "it can be done", and (as you have correctly emphasized) to point out that software can make a huge difference in how mecanums behave.
In the bigger context, though, your experience with mecanum drives clearly shows. Every benefit provided by mecanums comes at a cost. Even the added mobility, which many see as a pure benefit, comes at the cost of additional driver training and practice driving time to fully utlize it.
The year we built mecanum the added complexities of our drive (and other mechanisms) meant that we did not have the final, working robot ready until about 2 hours before the FedEx truck arrived. It wasn't until the end of our second regional before our driver was truly able to intuitively take advantage of our increased mobility to deke out other robots. It was AWESOME when it worked... just beautiful, really... but until then we wasted a lot of time in pushing battles where our mecanum really didn't help.(Although it didn't hurt nearly as much as we had expected... we could hold ground with many robots and actually push some with 2 motor drives or poor gear choices.)
In our final year of competition we built a torquey 8 wd machine that could accelerate, stop, turn 90 degrees and accelerate in about the same amount of time that the mecanum could drive forward, then strafe sideways. It was an easy build/program (not that mecanums are particularly hard to program with the cRio), a top pushing machine that could "get air" off the bumps and, in the end... very close to as maneuverable as the mecanum.
But it wasn't as cool.
Duke has it right... there are lots of good reasons why mecanums aren't the best choice for this year's game... or for any year's game. But they do work, they CAN climb, and they are very, very cool.
Our mecanum robots competition life was over in a few months, but five years later I still have people asking me "what's with those wheels?"
If you haven't built/driven a mecanum, you owe it to yourself to try it at some point. Maybe this year...?
Jason