Recent Kit Base Performance

[D.Allred]

Originally Posted by fargus111111111

By "other" I mean some sort of omni-directional drive train as a simple skid steer is something we already know how to do and we can purchase and be running very quickly. We have attempted swerve twice in the past, the first time we were very successful, 2009. The second time, we don't talk about that robot much, 2013, the swerve system was gone by our second regional. I therefore have been exploring that path along with the octo-canum and butterfly paths.

The lack of a drive train development time is an issue I see on my team, as much as this would be an exercise on how to build another drive it is more an exercise in what other options are out there and how to go about choosing the best one. We have a lot of new students who have no idea what the difference is between a mecanum, omni, and traction wheel and they are even more clueless when presented with the question, "what is a (insert your favorite drive style here) drive?" This lack of knowledge often results in us building another skid steer purely for ease and skimming through an important part of the early development of our robot. (not that skids are bad, I certainly like them I just see many competitive advantages to being able to move in any direction)

I see.

Our students have always wanted to explore swerve. That would definitely take a lot of development to make it a "go-to" solution. Sab-BOT-age has published a lot of information if you want to take the swerve plunge.
http://wiki.team1640.com/index.php?title=Swerve_Central

Simbotics has a great design guide for your students to explore different drive trains and selection criteria.
http://www.simbotics.org/files/pdf/drivetraindesign.pdf

Good luck with your training.

David

[Bkeeneykid]

Many of our very successful robots have been built on a stock drive chassis. It seems as our team gets older, the students and mentors who both have the desire and capabilities to create a custom drive chassis gets fewer and fewer. It always depends on the game, but this year, we knew right away we would have to spend time creating a VERY robust drive train, something none of our few members had any experience with. Both our 2014 and 2016 robots are built upon the newer AM14U chassis, and we've had great experiences with both of those. We modified our AM14U3 to have an indent in the front for the Rock Wall and a ball opening, and we spent considerably less time cutting these on the porta-band than we would have spent on our own. In light of not being able to get AndyMark pneumatic wheels, we adapted their hubs to our own wheels, with moderate success. Frankly, for low resource teams such as mine, I think time saved on the kit chassis is worth more than creating any of your own.

I'm not the only one with this opinion, as I talked to the other teams in my school district about this at Maker Faire KC (2335, 1984). 1984 used a VersaFrame bot, and had troubles with it throughout the entire day. They still said they preferred it, but they also lost a few matches from it. 2335 used a modified kit chassis like ours, but they used a aluminum super frame around it for bumper mounting.