Quote:
Originally Posted by tuXguy15
Our team wants to experiment with different drive trains and was wondering which would be the best to play with. What are the advantages and disadvantages of them?
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I (and many of the other people here) could probably fill multiple encyclopedia-sized tomes with the advantages and disadvantages of different drive trains and configurations of drive trains. There's an entire world of custom drive trains that opens up the moment you step outside of the appealing and excellently designed kitbot-shaped box.
I'll reiterate for a moment what KrazyCarl said-- before you even start thinking about what kind of custom drive train you're going to build, consider very carefully your resources-- what kind of budget does this have? How much time is your team willing to spend developing it? What kind of sponsors do you have? What are the lead times on parts from those sponsors (we have a waterjetting sponsor that needs us to give them CAD files at least three weeks before they manufacture, which limits their use during build season)?
Once you've answered all those questions, then brainstorming is a good idea-- if it's just for the joy of designing something out of the box, then you might very well consider octocanum or swerve drive or any of the other myriad of cool custom drive trains out there-- if you're developing it for competition, your goals are probably quite different. If you're developing specifically for competition, in fact, you'll probably want to stick to making a 6WD that you can manufacture and start driving super fast, in addition to being as flexible as at all possible. There has never been a year where you couldn't complete the game challenge with a well-designed 6WD (at least in recent memory).
In terms of awesome projects for drive trains, a lot of great ones have already been mentioned-- an octocanum is a very cool project (in fact that's what my team has been working on). Butterfly is, as mentioned, a nice, relatively simple project (considering that 3928 has so kindly used a good deal of COTS parts and posted many pictures). This late, I wouldn't suggest developing swerve-- you might be able to pull it off, but there's a lot of mechanical and programming complexity there.
Another suggestion would be to CAD all of the above drive trains-- it's good practice and you'll learn a lot about your program of choice. And CAD has that nice thing about being free. If you do that, then you can look at all your designs and pick out the one that makes most sense/ you'd like to build the most.