Omni Wheels Vs. Mecanum Wheels

[Ginger Power]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

There are other drive train configurations available, like swerve, octocanum, and apparently something my students were talking about today called "butterfly"... I'm still not entirely clear on how that one works, but apparently they got it from another team at the regional. However, those are drastically more complex and difficult to do right.

A butterfly drive is an articulating drivetrain with some sort of traction wheels paired with omni wheels (very similar to octocanum). In our configuration (which we kept off our robot for weight purposes and lack of necessity for our strategy) we have a 4" omni wheel paired with a custom made 2.5" traction wheel with rough top tread. Each module is actuated by a 1 1/16" bore 1" stroke pneumatic cylinder. We have found that butterfly drives are not overly complex but I wouldn't recommend using one without experimenting with it in the off season. The team that has really made this design famous is 3928 Team Neutrino. They had a butterfly drive for Ultimate Ascent and it worked extremely well for them. They have an even better version of it on their Aerial Assist bot. I believe Aren Hill a former mentor for Neutrino current mentor for 148 Robowranglers conceived the idea and could explain it much better than I can.

Edit: Trent B beat me to it