3048's tri-lobe drive train and a video request?

[thedude019]

Team 2399 used the same concept. Easily my favorite creative drive system.

[GeeTwo]

Beautiful sheet metal work on the tri-wheels, and nice staggering of the front and rear to reduce the spacing between the chassis plates.

What's the relative gearing between the 4" wheels and the "metawheels"? It seems to me that you'd have to gear very low for the metawheel axle and back up for the individual ones.

How does it handle on level carpet? It looks like a bear to turn (long wheelbase and narrow track).

I see that you are using KoP chassis inner plates, inverted to get the drive axle higher (and the motors lower). Why did you use a AM14Ux inner plate as the outer plate? The flange would be part of your frame perimeter, making bumper mounting more difficult. It looks like all of the pre-drilled holes you used are in both plates.

Are those brackets on the top front to mount bumpers? It looks like they'd be more than 12" off the carpet when the metawheels are rotated to the high position (so that there are only four wheels on the carpet). Is that an optical illusion?

[Dave Hurt]

When we had all our motors working and no issues with belts or hubs, it actually turned fairly well (in the video we had a speed controller that came unplugged, so we were running on 3 of 4 motors, made life difficult). If we had more time and parts to do it, I wanted to try swapping the front wheels out for omni wheels to see how much that reduced our load while turning. As for gearing, I don't remember... a couple of our students did all the design work for it and they figured the gear ratios. The total height of the wheel assembly was 9", so the tabs you're referring to were the top of our bumper, so even with the wheels rotated, we weren't that tall. On flat ground, our wheels never really rotated, so height wasn't an issue. It would be very uncommon for us to have all 4 wheels rotating at once. As for the flange, our bumpers rested on them. We didn't get dinged in inspection for it...