Assistance with Mecanum Wheels

[dtengineering]

When you search CD for mecanums, also search for mechanum and meccanum, two common misspellings of the word. You should find a very helpful white paper in there somewhere.

We did mecanum last year with the AM wheels each coming off a Banebots 12:1 gearbox, with no suspension... but a fair bit of flex in the frame. Although our drive system was not as smooth as some of the other mecanums, I don't believe that was due to a lack of having a suspension... not a big deal on a flat playing surface, but not having our drive code fully optimized and PID loops fully tuned.

The Banebots gearboxes and encoders (with divider board) worked great, but the programmers still had a real challenge getting all the wheels to work together in a usable fashion. You may want to consider using a gyro to control for rotation rather than basing all your movement calculations on the encoder feedback. We tried both, went with the encoders only, but in retrospect could perhaps have benefitted from using a gyro.

Now that we have the robot back at the shop, though... and on an uncarpeted, not particularly level cement floor, the lack of suspension is a real pain... it makes it difficult to show people just how cool mecanum is.

Congratualtions on choosing a really cool drivetrain design, just try to keep other systems simple enough that you have a couple of weeks to practice and fine tune everything. Mecanums are not only more complex to program, but also require the driver to re-learn everything they know about robot driving in order to take full advantage of it.

Jason