pic: Can anybody give me advice on my Butterfly drive that I am working on?

[Electronica1]

Originally Posted by Dunngeon

What's the justification behind using belts/chain to connect the two sides? One of the major benefits of a Butterfly setup is the increased mobility of the 4 Omni wheels when driven independently.

From what I understand, a lot of teams with butterfly link the wheels on each side together so that they don't loose power during a pushing match due to a wheel loosing contact with the ground.

Originally Posted by Dunngeon

Another question, with the traction wheels on the outside, its possible that with a scrub-steer setup and 4wd; That the robot won't be able to turn smoothly since the wheelbase is so long. It would essentially jitter (bounce) over the ground as the side wheels move in opposite directions. Not saying it would happen to this robot, since I don't know it's final weight; but my recommendation would be to place the omni's on the outside and the traction on the interior. It's what nearly every other implementation of Butterfly uses. See this butterfly implementation

Just an fyi, they had the traction wheels on the outside.

[Dunngeon]

Originally Posted by Electronica1

From what I understand, a lot of teams with butterfly link the wheels on each side together so that they don't loose power during a pushing match due to a wheel loosing contact with the ground.

Oh, that makes sense; especially when up against the stronger drivebases.

Just an fyi, they had the traction wheels on the outside.

Suppose I should have made that clearer. Most teams I've seen run on the Omni's the majority of the time, and the axle is run through that wheel because it's the primary wheel. The axle placement on the traction wheel, at least to me, implied that the traction wheel was the primary.

[runneals]

We found that the pneumatic pistons worked really well (and were pretty small) to switch between omni and traction mode (plus gave the effect of low rider )

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me or the team and they can probably field your questions about it.