pic: West coast drive design

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Hawiian Cadder

1/16 tubing is maybe a little thin, depending on the challenge and how heavy the robot is. The only teams i have seen using 1/16 tube also had 8 wheels, i don't know if the fact that 8 wheel drives tend to rock less violently had anything to do with it.

Are you speaking with experience?

[Hawiian Cadder]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Are you speaking with experience?

I was too busy at nationals to collect any real information so I had our scouting team (we had no chance of picking or being picked, so they had not much to do) collect information from 250 ish teams (the number there with custom skid steer tank drive (did not ask about any other drive-train, did not ask about kit-frames), this data included:

which wheels were dropped, and by how much (or if omnis were used)
wheel diam
speed / speeds
motors in drive-train
width of track

One or more of them (dont know which) wrote addition info on material thickness. I don't know if it was sheet-metal or tubes, but there was a definite correlation between more wheels, and thinner materiel. What I don't know is if this was because more wheels weigh more and so they were trying to save weight, or if they actually looked at any FEA or prototypes and decided that with less weight on each wheel the frame would experience less stress and thus could be thinner, teams were more likely to use thicker materiel if they were using larger wheels.


edit: info also included distance between wheels

[Danny Blau]

Is there any chance that your team is willing to share that info?

Have you thought of correlating it with scouting data you could ready start to draw some powerful conclusions as to what are the most competitive setups.

If you would like any help feel free to let me know.
Danny

[Hawiian Cadder]

right now the info is not typed, its in about 100 3 by 5 cards on my cork-board. I am writing a paper about the development of our multiple drive-train frame, I will add this data to that paper. unfortunately we never scout at nationals, so all I have is the mechanical data.


edit: sorry for thread-jack.

[Danny Blau]

One way to get the scouting data would be to use 1114's world database, they compile all the match scores and from that they are able to calculate OPR (Offensive Power Ranking). The nice thing about OPR is that its very impartial and non-bias compared to other scouting methods.

Currently 1114 has all the tabulated data from all of the regionals available (which would be a good place to start) and normally they don't analysis the data from champs but maybe we can work on that!

Thanks for sharing the data

Danny