Actuated Drive (Slide / H)

[DaveL]

Originally Posted by Owen Busler

The wheel is slightly in front of our center of mass, so we would go in a circle when we strafed. Our programming team coded some very nice correction software to make the bot strafe perfectly sideways.

+1

On our prototype bot we mounted the strafe wheel to a transverse support, like the trailing arm in a front wheel drive car. We used a week spring of approx 1/5 of the weight of the bot on a 4 wheel drive bot.

Going in sideways in one direction worked better. It seemed to dig in better. Going the other sideways direction the wheel seemed to ride up and slide more. We ended up with a vertical slide spring, but I would have rather used the traverse arm with pneumatics as I believe it would be lighter and then we could adjust the downward force and lift it up when not needed.

Did anyone build this type of mechanism and use pneumatics to deploy it?
Dave