Combo Drive --- Swerve Decision

[Alpha Beta]

I am curious as to what the gearing between the two wheel sets are on the 3 Oct-canum drives posted thus far. One of the advantages of a 6WD is the ability to add two shifting transmissions.

Are these teams getting a similar bennefit by having their traction wheels geared for a different speed than their mecanums?

If so would you choose to have your traction wheels geared faster or slower?

• I was under the impression that mecanums could only be geared so fast before the torque requirements for strafing were compromised. It might be nice to have the extra speed then placed in the traction wheels.
• I've also been under the impression that mecanums have more difficulty pushing than traction wheels, and it might be nice to have more torque under the tracton wheels for those pushing battles.

[Jonathan Norris]

The majority of the systems I have seen so far use smaller traction wheels, with some gearing to have more torque with the traction wheels.

[Chris is me]

I could be completely misremembering, but it was very briefly discussed with some members of my team at least in part before our Kickoff meeting. The obvious use to us was to push or dash past defenders and just get to the scoring zone, then switch to the mecanum drive to reorient and strafe within the scoring lane. For all the flak I've given mecanum, this isn't the worst year for it.

However, our team has incredibly limited resources and we did not want to take a risk with our drivetrain this year. Also, the zone at the end of the field is a whole seven feet wide... Thus six wheel drive was the immediate conclusion.

I'm all in favor of calling the drivetrain "octocanum", "wave drive", "XDrive", or whatever silly name people want as long as it's catchy.