4 vs 6 wheels (what to choose)

[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