Drive Train Choices

[MichaelBick]

Originally Posted by tuXguy15

Our team wants to experiment with different drive trains and was wondering which would be the best to play with. What are the advantages and disadvantages of them?

I highly reccomend perfecting your 6wd before you look any further into special drivetrains. A good 6wd will carry your team for many years. Once you have a solid drive, you can expand from there, based on what your team wants.

While mecanum, swerve, octocanum, and nona(and many others) are known to provide extra "manuverability", I personally find that this manuverability is often not used correctly, and better performance will usually come from more driver practice instead. I think it would be more worthwhile your time to look into a drivetrain that uses less resources or improve your current drivetrain(reduce resources too).

One promising drivetrain is butterfly. Butterfly can be built using very little resources. In addition, it offers performance increases over typical 6wds like getting out of t bones, straighter tracking for auton, and being unturnable(also butterfly can be built to have two different speeds).

There are many additions you can do to a 6wd too. We personally have added motors, used wider wheels, reduced resources to build our 6wd(primarily using new COTs parts), and reduced weight. Other notable additions that we are testing during the offseason are belts and drop down omnis/ball casters to get out of tbones.