Quote:
Originally Posted by ekapalka
For some reason I edited out a few important details... It has a robot-centric mecanum drive train, which from what I hear, will probably never strafe perfectly straight without gyro intervention. We spent about an hour working on it today and (for the moment) are using a series basic statements to determine the rotation speed (which overshoots and is a bit jittery).
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In my experience, we have had many a prototype drivetrain put together by newbies without any care given to weight distribution and very little care to how perfect a rectangle the frame is. It was just a visually all 4 wheels are on the ground, check.
There was a good amount of care given to how well the rollers can spin when they were assembled and this is verified periodically. We've never tried to quantify the amount of deviation from expected travel, but I've never seen a robot deviate so much that we HAD to implement gyro control. We just did so to open the possibility for better driver control. I believe 2 years ago we didn't use a gyro during the competition at all...
so, check your rollers spin nice and smooth, and for big obvious mechanical problems (the wheel mounting? you mentioned, 1 gearbox assembled incorrectly, etc...), but if you are just trying to get a prototype drivetrain moving, you shouldn't need to spend a lot of time on weight distribution. You might post some video in the mechanical section and get some feedback from folks on that side.
As far as the gyro implementation goes, have you tried
this?