[FizMan]

Thanks for the plethora of responses!

First off Henry; that was exactly what I was thinking for rotating the wheels... in fact exactly; that was the two options I had in mind; the X and the M shape for the chains. Good thing aboot the M is that it uses less chain (right?), but if the chain falls off, then we won't be able to steer. With the X, more chain, but if one falls off, we still have three steering wheels right? Though... I suppose that won't really help. I think I like the M better.

I was thinking aboot it again last night, and I figured that all the wheels wouldn't need to independantly go in reverse. If we wanted to turn the robot, have the "engine" (motors, gearbox, transmission) power the two sets of wheels, just rotate the wheels back to the forward/backward position (a max rotation of 90 degrees) and have them spin in opposite directions.

I'd still like to have a 6 motor drive with one transmission and one gearbox though. So I figured, what if we had the engine outputting to both sets of wheels, but on one set employ the 'reverse gear'. When we're in the normal driving mode where we're swerving and whatnot, the reverse gear won't be engaged. But when we want to steer, we'll pop in the reverse gear causing the wheel sets to spin in opposite directions; and if we want to turn right, we'll run the motors foward, and instead if we want to turn left, we'll run the motors backward.

And we could use software to allow the driver to switch between conventional tank-drive and the swerve drive easily enough through this.

Laff, $@#$@#$@#$@# you Rodd! Looks similar to what I had in mind; except for the steering bit. I kind of want to avoid the whole "car" steering bit... seems like a bit much having to include differentials and whatnot.


It's a good idea to be able to just turn the wheels around 180 degrees to achieve the reverse; but wouldn't you need four motors (one for each wheel) in order to spin two of them backwards and the other two forwards?


And thanks for the wheel idea... I had something like that going around in my head, just couldn't make the parts come together properly. And after seeing that; I got a slightly different approach to it. I'll model it and put it up tonight after work.


EDIT:
Al... does that mean you can't use 6 motors ONLY when turning? Would they work fine for a swerve drive not turning? And then say when we are turning, we could just use software to make two of the motors not run during that time?