Thanks for the suggestions!
I'm going to toy around with some different ideas, and see which should work pretty good.
Well, Basically The motors (Preferably the CIMs) are attached to a chain system, and geared down by sprockets.
Now here's the thing:
We're only using an 8:1 gearing ratio.
Now, I know every team will say you need at least 20:1 w/ the CIMs, even I tell myself that, but we surprised ourselves this past year.
First off, the fact that the Cims were used to running at 30amps meant that you needed higher gearing, and with the slight boost to 40a, we needed a little less.
Now eight sounds like it wouldn't quite cut it, but compared to the torque of other bots, we did good.
Since we didn't sacrifice too much speed, we were the fastest at our regional (9fps), there were a few bots that would shift to something around 35fps (which I thought was a little silly), but everyones default speed was 7fps or less.
Now, somehow we managed to have enough torque to push bots and bins over the field. I remember a match at VCU this past year where we cleaned out the Red scoring area and Pushed RoboDogs (or is it Dawgs?) into the starting position, and held them there, all at the same time. So far we've beaten alot of the local teams at sumo matches. We had an event at the Science Museum of Virginia, and we brought over the VCU practice ramp. We ended up challenging the teams to sumo matches for the hill, and we won just about every time, or we tied.
Now, 8:1 probably still has it's flaws. But it worked great for us this past year, and so we'll probably use it again.
Anyway, the Chain system carries across to 2 wheels on both sides. 1 Powers the Left side, one the right.
A Worm gear Motor (preferably the windows) is mounted to a large sprocket which pivots to wheel assemblies 180deg. The forward/reverse force is sent down to the wheels through some beveled gears into the wheel assembly, and then another chain/sprocket.
So far I've made models from legos, edubot parts, and tried some dynamic simulation, and it works pretty well. My main concern is the strength of the beveled gears. I tried to find some w/ a small enough pitch and enough strength for the system while receiving force. I think I did ok, we'll see once we get crakin' on it.
Anyway, I haven't heard of anyone whos'e really attempted an on the fly multi drive, let alone that kind of forward thrust system.
I might post the little program I came up with the other night/morning (
) just for fun.