Your thoughts on Mecanum wheels....

[Maggie27]

Originally Posted by Tytus Gerrish

more moving parts. more things that can break

That's what I'm most worried about. My team has a tendency of having things break when we MOST need it!

Originally Posted by BigJ

also, your programmers will need a lot of time to develop and test (also trig skills)

1675 used mecanum fro the first time last year, and although it was hard, I had fun learning all the vector theory to program it.

Also with the programming, we have almost no knowledge on, so I'm definately worried about this as well. We do have some people learning it though as we speak.

[whytheheckme]

We used the AndyMark mecanum wheels last year.... with some problems.

The first set of wheels that we received, the tabs on each side of all the wheels weren't bent to the proper angle (or even evenly!)

We received new plates from AndyMark, that were bent properly (we still needed to do some minor adjustments, but it was much better.) The biggest problem after that was how freely the rollers spun. Some rollers on the same wheel would spin freely, while others were completely bound up.

This was just our experience though, because I know that The Enforcers (Farmington, CT) used mecanum wheels last year, with very very minimal problems (as I recall, they opened the box and assembled the wheels with no modifications.) They also somehow got away with going through all of their regionals using the original carrier plates in the BaneBots transmissions.... (lucky!)

So all in all, the mecanum can provide some good features that can't be seen in other drive trains, but the assembly is very heavy (4 motors and 4 gear boxes), and can require A LOT of fiddling with.

From the coding aspect (my specialty), it didn't take long to come up with code to drive the system. We actually have the BaneBots encoders installed on all four wheels from last years bot, which we implemented into a PID loop...... but the BaneBots encoders are constructed poorly, and after a few matches, the superglue (Yes, Superglue) thats holding the encoder wheel to the shaft starts to heat, and allows the wheel to move around, and eventually grind up against the encoder, rendering them useless. I would not recommend the BaneBots encoders.

Jacob

[kSniper]

Yea my team is debating between several drive trains as well, but we are stuck on the comparisons between holonomic and mecanum....i have made another thread for this so if anyone could help me out i have a few questions posted on it.....thanks

[Kyle Love]

Mecanum wheels take immense amounts of tweaking of the rollers, just a half turn of the bolt too much can make it not spin freely. There also needs to be some kind of suspension, spring steel makes a really good suspension for mecanums.

From the construction stand point. If you haven't built a mecanum in the fall, it may be a little too labor/software/testing intensive to be successfully done in the build season.