Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
Ouch. We nearly made a similar mistake. Long wheelbase + 6" mecanums and clamping gearboxes meant we'd be dragging the gears on the platform crossing it. Various members wanted to up to the 8" AM mecanums because they were "stronger" and PDV-able. I wanted the Vex for weight. We already had a chassis together, so we're lucky we checked and discovered the AMs would've been too wide. We're just squeaking under width as is. And we were 120# at Dallas, so we didn't have weight either. Heh.
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In my case, I didn't pay attention to the space between the yellow totes and the angled player station walls and found that we wouldn't be able to position the robot in our desired starting position for a three-tote autonomous. We redesigned the frame (and, in fact, the rest of the robot) to envelope part of the tote so we could fit in that space, but a million other things have come up that make achieving that autonomous strategy a distant possibility.
The wheels ended up on the inside because the parts we'd ordered from Vex were for a dead axle sheet metal drive. We could've cantilevered the mecanum wheel and driving pulley off one side of the versablock, but that made me nervous, so we ended up with this weird drive.
It performs well. It's a little unstable and will rock from side to side, but we're bottom-heavy enough that we don't tip.