[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by Bjenks548

I'm running over some possible drive train ideas, with physics not starting till next year i have a few questions.

1) What (if any) advantages is there to having 2 gear boxes with 2 cims in each as appose to 4 gear boxes with a cim in each?

2) Just wondering if this would work. A drive train with 2 mecanum wheels in the center and an omni wheel in each corner. Only the mecanum wheels are powered. If I'm thinking of this correctly you always are crabing with no way to turn your robot. Is this correct? I'm not looking for people telling me how stupid it would be to have a robot that can't turn, i know this, just would this happen?

3) In the two years I've been on the team we have not used pneumatics. Just making sure, the cylinders can be fully extended, fully compacted, but can they be put somewhere in between? Like half extended.

I'm sure I'll come up with more questions to ask about drive trains, that's all i can think of right now.

1. Aside from complexity, weight is a big savings. It is 2 less sets of reductions you need to take care of.

2. Mecanums need to be used in sets of 4. I'm not going to go into all of the details, but the physics of mecanums require 4 to achieve "crabbing". Thus, using 2 mecanums to drive your robot will not do what you are trying to achieve.

3. The short answer is yes they can. The long answer is that its fairly complicated to do so. The rules this past year on pneumatics were loosened slightly, and in some cases I saw teams that were using 3 position cylinders.


-Brando