Video of Mecanum Drive Running Circles Around 6 Wheel Drives

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by DsRandhawa3244

(I'll post videos later, I'm not able to get to them now)

I was a driver for 1259 this year, and we used 4 wheel mecanum. Although I still feel we would have been a better robot with tank drive, we used the mecanum as well as we could. In Wisconsin I was able to outmaneuver some of the opposing alliances (with tank drive) with a combination of strafing and spinning to get to the pyramid so we could start our 3 level climb.

Would I have been able to do that with tank? Probably...chances are with tank we wouldn't get into situations where we had to really try hard to outmaneuver other robots. But the mecanum allowed us to move in dimensions that tank robots couldn't, and in the small, cramped side lanes on either side of the field near the pyramids, I think that additional degree of freedom helped a little bit.

A quick aside--this has befuddled our programmers for some time now. Our robot strafes almost perfectly on smooth floors, like tile, or the traditional wooden gym floors. Yet, on the field at both Wisconsin and Duluth, strafing was slow, and required a lot of manual adjustment on my end to do well. Trying to strafe with just one joystick meant turning while moving in one direction. It was our first year doing mecanum, so if anyone's able to point us in the right direction, that'd be swell. We thought it was the individual spindles on the wheels slipping, but I've seen other robots use 6" mecanum wheels from andymark no problem.

FIRST fields ain't level. Also, carpet != wood/tile you'll get drastically different performance characteristics.