Easy OmniTrack

[Joe_Widen]

Well I was board so I made an OmniTrack in Alibre Designs. It uses square aluminum tubing as the frame. Then i drilled some wholes in it and welded a few connector pieces on it, put in the shaft, bushings, and roller and here it is. The roller isn't perfect, I know, so try to focus on the shape of it.


I'm an extreme "I want to make something" state.

[Tristan Lall]

Do you have a design for the drive sprocket?

[Joe_Widen]

I'm thinking right now that I'll either make a custom drive shaft using hex stock or do the track as double wide and integrate an aluminum chain in there somehow. I'm leaning towards the hex stock idea. I think I'll will it with the roller imprints on it so its grabs the rollers as it turns. It'll be pretty tricky. Looking at it, If I used two wheels with high traction matierial on it and then put high traction matierial on the link's frame, it would work pretty well. The only problem would be alignment would need to be near perfect. I'll cad one up real quick in a bit.

[John Gutmann]

use a cylinder that the tracks will wrap around at each end and then make a spherical hole around it for the balls, and then just bore a hole in the center. You can use anyway to drive it, because it will just be like attaching a sprocket, spur gear or whatever to a normal wheel.

[sciencenerd]

Just a quick question... is there an actual application you can think of for this? It seems to me to be heavier than normal track, and have less traction. It would help turning, I suppose, but at the expense of pushing forse, which is usually the purpose of a track. Is there something I'm missing here?

[Joe_Widen]

Heres a way to drive it.

The reason this is being made is because it offers all the advantages of tank treads and the advantage of holonomic drive (put them on 45's to each other). It doesnt have the disadvantages such as hard to turn and being easily pushed. The only disadvatage I can think of is that its more difficult to turn tank tread.

[Jeremiah Johnson]

Originally Posted by sciencenerd

Just a quick question... is there an actual application you can think of for this? It seems to me to be heavier than normal track, and have less traction. It would help turning, I suppose, but at the expense of pushing forse, which is usually the purpose of a track. Is there something I'm missing here?

Omnitrack is like omnidrive right? Move in all directions but with tracks. I dont know how that would work but good luck... I think.

[Skute327]

I had a simalar idea after competition this year after our omni wheels proved flimsy (I still have some parts)
I would really like to see this work, but my team cant afford to try
to drive, I would suspend the track betweeen two chains or belts
It would be much smoother insted of trying to drive a "square wheel"
it would also need support in the middle (difficult with indevidual links)
I would use sliders maybe delrin or something tough (and replaceable)

Hopefully next years game warrants using something like this

[MikeJ675]

Ok, so I got a little inspired. (Modeled in Rhino 3d)

[Joe_Widen]

Now thats just creative.

[MikeJ675]

For anyone having trouble visualizing what it would look like, I made this-


I love Rhino3D

You can fill in the guts yourself.

[Cuog]

These Omnitracks(i preffer the mecanums tho) seem like an awesome idea but i feel that the use of them will be difficult, look at the cost of mecanum wheels to produce. People are talking about over 1000 dollars to machine. Then there is the weight issue for these, and how big will the drive wheels need to be, in this case i think that it will prove much more effective to go with standard mecanum wheels then these treads(but of course someone will likely prove me wrong now)

[MikeJ675]

hey, never said they were effective, cost especially. I just think they're freakin' cool.

[s_forbes]

One thing I learned this year is that there are tons of teams that can build really effective robots that can complete the task extremely well. I doubt that a lot of other teams (including us) will ever get quite that good at designing robots, so it is better to just build a unique robot that will be noticed for it's creativeness.

I'd really like to see a robot with those mecanum tracks, it would be out of this world!

[Joachim]

Originally Posted by Cuog

...People are talking about over 1000 dollars to machine. Then there is the weight issue for these, and how big will the drive wheels need to be, in this case i think that it will prove much more effective to go with standard mecanum wheels then these treads(but of course someone will likely prove me wrong now)

Clearance between the rollers and belt is only 1/8", but someone could maybe use these to make a less expensive(?) version:


angled roller belts from Interlox