Quatro 4 wheel drive

[Aignam]

Like Audis? I always though this somehow involved differentials. Hm..

[MikeDubreuil]

That's an intersting idea. I'm definately thinking about developing something like that for our robot. We use a modular 4 motor design.

I have a feeling I'll feel like a researcher this summer, I have so much stuff I want to try out. My ultimate goal is to perfect our drive train. We have a really great system- in theory, now we just have to take it out of the development phase and make it production quality.

Our drive train: made of 4 modular "towers". Each module is driven by either a drill or a Chip. Chips in the front, drills in the back. Each tower also has a skyway pneumatic wheel. The motors are geared so that if given the same polarity, the wheel turns the same way (to eliminate forward reverse RPM biases).

Our current problem: the robot doesn't drive real well. It hops around and generally appears like the students have to fight it to get it to drive correctly.

I'm not mechanical, but I feel our drivetrain has too much friction. I think if we used something like 1126's omni-wheel on the front we would drive like a BMW. (BTW, their omni-wheel makes me druel) Any other suggestions?