Quote:
Originally Posted by Team3763 Adam
My team and I are looking at using Mecanum wheels for this year's competition as a means of strafing. My few questions are:
- Could they be our only form of Drive wheels for forward and side movement, or would it be best to pair them with another set of wheels to allow for seperate forward and side movements?
- How should they be mounted on a Robot Chassis. IE should the diagonal wheels be slanted in opposing directions - either away from the center of the robot or towards. ///-CenterOfRobot-\\\ OR \\\-COR-///
- What form of drive in LabVIEW would they be programmed with? Arcade but with different inputs on the joysticks? Or...
Any and all diagrams/pictures/screenshots of LabVIEW are welcome! |
When using mecanum wheels you need to put one on each corner with the axles parallel to the front bar of your frame (i.e. don't angle the wheels at all). Off the top of my head the rollers on the wheels should make an "x" pattern when viewing them from the top of the drivetrain. Check the documentation on
www.andymark.com or
www.vexrobotics.com/vexpro to be sure.
There is a good whitepaper here on Chief Delphi describing some of the physics concepts behind the wheel and clearing away some of the misconceptions about the wheels. It was written based off some of Ether's posts but I don't remember who it's by (can someone post a link to this whitepaper if you know which one I'm referring to?).
As for programming, there should be a "holonomic drive" VI in the WPI library VIs section that does the math for mecanum automatically. You have one joystick axis for forward and backward movement, one for strafing, and one for rotation (much like arcade).