VersaDrop Stability

[caume]

A few people on my team have been looking into drive train designs, and we are currently curious about Octocanum. If your team has used octocanum, have you designed the parts on your own, or did you get something off COTS, such as VersaDrop? Also, what are big pros and cons of the drive that most people may not think of? Thanks in advance!

[Jay O'Donnell]

Versadrop was a new product this year, and since there weren't any octocanums (or other drivetrains like butterfly or H that would use it) that I know of, I don't think it got any use.

[pfreivald]

We used pneumatically-shifting octocanum for several years. It's big, it's clunky, it's heavy, it's expensive.

It also made for some awesome omnidirectional awesomeness and some fantastic defense (and plowing through defense--we often had no issues even against treads and six-CIM tank drives). My drivers *loved* it, and it's about two lines of code harder to program than octocanum in general.

So it's definitely a trade-off.

------------

We made everything ourselves. Our wheel pods were 3/32 steel plates, plasma cut and then bent in-house.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqQ65JyNBfg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouoV9nP_LKE

[Tal_Esh]

This year for the 1st time in our team's history we have designed and built a butterfly drivetrain, and luckily one of the CAD team members decided to design a butterfly mechanism during the summer so he could help.
With our design (2 8" pneumatics wheels & 2 4" omni wheels) one of the major goals was to lower the omni wheels to the ground (their default position was higher than the 8" wheel), this was achieved using 2 cylinders for each module:
-1 "weak&long" cylinder to lower the wheels
-1 "strong&short" cylinder push the omni wheel below the pneumatic wheel.

Later on I will look for some pictures of the module it self

Reveal video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwHWlINEuo8

OffSeason projects thread http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...highlight=3316