Quatro 4 wheel drive

[ufa_mike]

I have thought about building a feedback system for a robot that controls slip on the wheels, and keeps the robot going where u want it to go.
I have figure that the best way to do this would to be having four seperate gearboxes driving four seperate wheels. THen a shaft encoder would provide feedback for the program to make sure all four wheels are moving at the same speed. The friction a wheel delivers when it is slipping along the ground is much less than if it were not slipping along the ground. SO if one of the wheels hits the ramp like in this years game, that wheel would emidiatly slow-down. On the regular system the other wheels would start slipping and lose the traction ability to push the robot up the ramp. In my system the other wheels would slow down aswell until there are spinning the same speed as the other one and gain maximum tractiuon to push the robot up the ramp.

[Aignam]

Like Audis? I always though this somehow involved differentials. Hm..

[MikeDubreuil]

That's an intersting idea. I'm definately thinking about developing something like that for our robot. We use a modular 4 motor design.

I have a feeling I'll feel like a researcher this summer, I have so much stuff I want to try out. My ultimate goal is to perfect our drive train. We have a really great system- in theory, now we just have to take it out of the development phase and make it production quality.

Our drive train: made of 4 modular "towers". Each module is driven by either a drill or a Chip. Chips in the front, drills in the back. Each tower also has a skyway pneumatic wheel. The motors are geared so that if given the same polarity, the wheel turns the same way (to eliminate forward reverse RPM biases).

Our current problem: the robot doesn't drive real well. It hops around and generally appears like the students have to fight it to get it to drive correctly.

I'm not mechanical, but I feel our drivetrain has too much friction. I think if we used something like 1126's omni-wheel on the front we would drive like a BMW. (BTW, their omni-wheel makes me druel) Any other suggestions?