Quote:
Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV
We're planing on building an Octocanum drive as well.
I don't think I have ever seen them with the wheels side by side before. Care to elaborate on your reasoning? |
Well, I wasn't the main man when it came to the design so I don't know all the reasons. I can say a few things.
One, we wanted two vastly different gear ratios for both wheels, so if we fed power through one axle, but to two different sets of gears, we could get that result. I'm taking a second look at team Neutrino's design, and I can see that they feed power to their secondary wheel by going through their omni wheel's axel and then they use another belt/chain to get to the second wheel. I don't know, maybe ours isn't quite as space efficient, but I see it as two solutions to the same problem.
Second, we wanted to snug one of these into each corner of the robot, so a square, fully enclosed design seemed to make sense. It was something we could mount directly onto the chassis. And because of how modular that blocky design is, replacement drive train boxes can be swapped quickly.
We're planning on bringing at least a few replacement boxes to competition in case we break a few.
Third, It was just what our designer thought up when we were looking for a new drivetrain design. I was one of the people on our team who pushed for this hybrid design, and he offered to draw something up. It made sense to him when he was designing it. He told me personally that he wanted to make something that would do the same thing as Neutrino's design without looking like a direct copy.
And maybe, now that I think of it, we may also have had an issue mounting a large mechanum wheel next to a plaction wheel in the same way team neutrino did.
I know I may not have completely answered your question. I'm just not informed enough as to the actual
design process, though I could tell you exactly how it works and why we're doing something like this this year.
I could ask the guy who designed it (he's brilliant) if you need any more information. He could give you a more exact answer.