Omni Wheels Vs. Mecanum Wheels

[JVN]

Originally Posted by Electronica1

Didn't 148 conceive and run the first butterfly drive in 2011?

It is difficult to track the origins of an idea...

In the pre-season of 2010 148 build a drivetrain which combined an H-drive (5 omni wheels, 4 in "normal" configuration and 1 sideways) with 4 drop down traction wheels. We called this a Nonadrive, since it has 9 wheels and we really like the number 9.

In 2010 we ran this same configuration on our competition robot Armadillo.

In pre-season 2011 we prototyped an Octocanum drivetrain (an articulating drivetrain which switches between 4 mecanum wheels and 4 traction wheels). This is something which I believe several other teams had done in the past.

We didn't like the performance of the mecanum wheels we had at the time, and switched them out for omni-wheels as part of a new experiment. This configuration could not move sideways, but had some cool features we liked. We jokingly called it "Butterfly" drive since you could swat it aside like a butterfly when it was in omni-mode. I believe we were the first to experiment with this configuration.

In 2011 we ran this same configuration on our competition robot Raptor.

We ran an evolved configuration in 2013 on our robot Viper.

This year, we're running another cool evolution of the Nonadrive which involves 2 center Omni-Wheels, which we're calling the "Decadrive." This is on our robot Vader.

We like articulating drivetrains. We've been playing with them since pre-season 2010, and we will probably continue to play with them. We're actually starting to work on a "History of the Robowrangler Drive" which will hopefully turn into something cool for our website.