Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Line
Be careful with this statement. Mecanum wheels absolutely requirement a certain amount of flex in a chassis system so that all 4 wheels maintain contact with the ground a majority of the time.
So either build a flexible chassis, or use suspension: one of the two.
A gyro can only do so much. With one wheel off the ground, you will run into a situation where the robot cannot correct itself and strafe at the same time. It will end up driving forward, backward, or sitting in place while the airborne wheel spins instead of sliding sideways like you want.
We ended up changing out our entire drivetrain to a slide drive at state champs. It ended up being lighter than mecanum and it always goes the direction you want it to.
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Having one of four wheels airborne sounds like more of a manufacturing problem to me, rather than a mecanum specific issue. There's a crazy amount of teams using mecanum this year without suspension and very rigid (for FRC) frames, you don't NEED it. The bigger issue (for the vast majority of mecanum teams) is the center of gravity distribution and strafing, which can either be corrected by a gyro, encoders and some code or not using mecanum.
Edit: I should clarify, varying weight on mecanum wheels is one of the larger issues with mecanum. Having no contact with the ground for one of the four wheels isn't a problem that is specific to mecanum, it's a manufacturing issue.