"W" Drive Versa Wheels

[wmarshall11]

Originally Posted by Joe G.

Image snip.

We did this to Colsons in 2014. Nasty, nasty traction. The individual segments flex and literally bite the carpet under load. They do wear faster than unmodified Colsons, but our robot played four events on the same wheels, and probably could have done another. All we did was rotate out the middle wheels to the ends after the second event.

We used the W tread wheels when they came out in 2013, and likely won't do so again. They wore quickly, and we also found their traction somewhat underwhelming.

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

I disagree on the bolded. In 2014, we noticed a difference in the distance we drove in autonomous on worn wheels compared to fresh ones (and our wear isn't as significant as what was shown in some pictures). The radius change is definitely a relevant concern as the wheels wear.

Seeing as the wheel pictured is from 11's 2014 robot, thought I'd chime in with a review.

We switched to the horizontal tread pictured after experimenting with a diamond pattern in 2013. The treading was done using a 1:1 scale drawing of the wheel with 0.5" cuts every 10° along the exterior that was taped to the stock wheel for alignment purposes. The horizontal tread was easier to apply than the diamond tread, since the diagonals required for the diamond required a jig to do consistently.

The wheels were solid performers on the field, performing the standard colson trick of getting grippier as they heated up. They wore about 1/16" during a 12 match + elims district event. We ended up swapping the center wheels with the outer wheels before elims at most events to ensure even-ish wear. They could have probably been run down quite a bit more without loss of traction, but there may have been issues with defeating the point of the dropped center. The wear pattern was interesting, rounding the points of the tread before eating away at the diameter, which created a sweet spot where the spread of each section would produce an almost flat profile on the ground.