[AllenGregoryIV]

Haven't seen this thread in awhile. I was a discobots mentor when we built this robot and was in charge of the control systems team.

Was it a fun challenge, yes. Would I ever build it for competition again, NO.

You absolutely need some form of suspension or you will be struggling to get all your wheels to touch the ground at the same time. If you use driver centric instead of robot centric controls it helps alleviate some of the problems with wheels slipping. Even the smallest imperfection in the floor will make your robot turn drastically, the plates around the mini-bot poles in 2011, were a huge problem for this drivetrain. The only sensor we really used was a gyro, to keep us oriented. We had "Halo" style controls, so one joystick was for strafing and forwards and backwards and the other was for rotation. We also implemented quick position buttons on the top the turn joystick so you could quickly go to any 90 deg offset from strait ahead.

By our 2nd event, we had it working well enough for us to be the 2nd overall pick and make it the finals before losing to 118 and 1477.

Very few games allow for you to give up that much of a traction advantage and still play well.