Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Line
Be careful with this statement....
So either build a flexible chassis, or use suspension: one of the two.
A gyro can only do so much... .
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Snipped quotes above and referencing everyone else's subsequent quotes as well here:
I don't have any hard measured evidence, but it certainly seems like the drive-ability gets worse over time. I believe this is due to slowly degrading the chassis alignment over time from hard use (maybe due to chassis warping from hard bumps, post-competition demos where someone runs it into a wall, etc).
We did our first gyro corrected drive system this year, and it makes a difference, but cant account for everything. Now in our post-season, if we look at the wheels when strafing one always seems to be slightly off from the others; maybe it's not resting on the ground with the same force as the others.
That's what led me to inquire about the utility of the pneumatic suspension benefits of the octocanum drive. I agree we want mecanum to be our primary, higher speed drive, but its seems if all the parts are right there because of the octocanum, it would be a shame not to find a way to add the suspension to the mecanum mode.
But, there's trade-offs with every engineering decision, and we will have to decide if the potential for a loss of pressure and reverting to traction, or some other octocanum failure is too big a risk to take. Or find a solution that doesn't suffer from that drawback.