Center Wheel Drop?

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

The right answer is a function of many things. How stiff is your robot frame? Stiffer frames can get away with less drop. How high is the center of mass? A high CoM exacerbates rock when accelerating or decelerating. How willing are you to frequently replace wheels/tread? The middle wheel generally wears quickest, reducing the effective drop over time. Being proactive about replacing it (or rotating wheels) lets you get away with less drop. Driver preference also plays a role in this. A little bit of scrub is helpful for tracking straight and for doing controlled turns, while more rock makes the robot drive more smoothly (but requires greater driver skill or software help to control).

Some of these factors are difficult to estimate beforehand. As a general rule, especially with the smaller robots used the past two seasons, most teams will be happy with 1/8" of drop.

I'll echo this.

We just did our first 6-wheel drive last year and did a 5/32" drop. It worked out pretty well for us, but there was a little more rock then we liked initially, especially when we used the W-tread. When we switched to rough top, it felt a lot better. We had a fairly stiff sheet metal channel drive. I'm not sure if 1/8" or 5/32" would work out better. We haven't tried the 1/8" yet. For sure we would if we knew we were using the W-tread.