FRC T-bone-ing and Hexagonal drive

[MichaelBick]

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe

Curious. What kind of butterfly did you run? This style? How did you have the controls set up? Were the front and rear wheels able to actuate independently?

They ran the neutrino style with slightly faster gearing. Each module had it's own actuator and motor.

[MrRoboSteve]

Hexagonal and round robots have trouble fitting through doors in some venues. Williams Arena, I'm lookin' at you!

[Abhishek R]

Originally Posted by Ari423

Wheels with rollers also can't cause a T-bone, since they can't push with any substantial force. Swerve drive can place a T-bone.

Not true - I'm not sure about mecanum, but you can definitely friction pin other robots with omnis, we did it all the time in 2014.

Personally I'm a fan of active mechanisms to get out of T-bones. Using our offseason edition of our H-drive in 2014 we never got stuck in a pin unless it was against the wall. However, a hexagon is another way to achieve the same goal. If your team feels it's worth pursuing, go ahead and do it - speaking from experience, it really is an awful feeling to not even be able to control the movement of your robot just because someone's pushing you around.

[Jay O'Donnell]

Originally Posted by Abhishek R

Not true - I'm not sure about mecanum, but you can definitely friction pin other robots with omnis, we did it all the time in 2014.

1058 did it with mecanum against teams with weaker tank drives or other non-tank drives pretty consistently in 2014. However once we met teams with more powerful drive trains we were less effective.

[Wayne TenBrink]

We retrofitted our 2014 bot for a hex frame (Octoframe, actually) last fall and used it at an off-season event. There is a brief thread on CD about the experience:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...30#post1406830

We weren't on the receiving end of a lot of T-Bone attempts at the event, but our driver did get a bit of experience with it. It helped a bit with T-Bones, but didn't appear to be a magic bullet. The biggest problem with bulged side bumpers came when we tried driving parallel to the wall. Once the tip of the bulge hit the wall, it turned the robot slightly toward the wall, which started an instant vicious cycle that sucked the bot tight into the wall. I don't expect we will try them again soon.