4 vs 6 wheels (what to choose)

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by Bernoulli

in all reality both of these have strengths and weaknesses however the way you go about your design ie: tank, omni, mecanum, swerve, crab will really determin which set up along with what you want it to ba able to do ie: manuvure, agility, strength, pusshing power, etc etc etc however it seems alot of teams have had success with a 6 wheel drive using 4 mecanum and 2 sticky wheels however its all up to how u want your robot to perform

Surely you mean omni wheels? I've never seen a 6wd robot with 2 traction wheels and 4 mecanum, nor have I ever heard of one.

I may sound picky, but there is a big difference between a mecanum wheel and an omni wheel.

[DinerKid]

A huge part of picking a drive train is what you want it to do and how you plan to build around it. Last year we wanted to build a goalie-bot. We decided quickly that we wanted to have the robot oriented so that we could block with the wide side. We then decided that a wide kicker would be a good idea. For this design mecanum was a just. we wanted to be able to drive really fast between the two goals but also strafe forward and backwards in order to drive up to the ball in order to kick.

For this year if you are confident that your programmers will be able to write line tracking code that will get you in position to score maybe you go with a 6 wheel rocker.

If you think you will end up manually positioning the bot to score then you have a bit more to think about. On one hand you can spin a 6 wheel rocker to make adjustments (to a certain point) while mecanum will easily strafe to do the same thing.

There isn't really any way to say which one is better. It depends on what you are trying to do and how you are trying to do it. Thats what makes this engineering.

~DK