What Pushed You Toward Mecanum Drive This Season?

[onecoolc]

Our team faced heavy debate over our drive train the first week. We would argue about it for a while, but could never really decide what we wanted to actually do.

After a while Sal (our mentor) pulled out a book of past robots, and showed us this bot with awesome custom Mecc wheels. We were WOW'd at first, then started to think, "Hey, we could do that!"

We liked the idea of the rubber adding extra traction. We liked the idea of not being pinned (despite the rules against pinning for too long this year). We liked the idea of being able to accurately manuever around the balls for greater aim, and we liked the idea of being able to easily block the other opponents. We liked the idea of being able to strafe over the bump.

What we really loved about it though, was the thought of making something that bad-$@#$@#$@# cool, and the challenges we would have to figure out doing so. So we did it, and I think we made the best decision.

(If you're wondering more about our wheels, which we're totally proud of, check out "Wheel Envy?" in the Robot Showcase forum)