Mecanum vs Treads

[dtengineering]

This is all very practical advice... and I agree that for winning this years' game, likely neither tank treads nor mecanums are the optimal choice.

Not to understimate the significance of competition, but allow me to point out that your robot will retire from competition just four months from now. Okay... maybe the odd off-season event, but really, once the championship is over, every design choice you made for "winning the game" suddenly becomes redundant.

It is totally okay to use treads or mecanums or swerve or hovercraft technology just beacause you think it is awesome.

We used mecanum wheels in 2007 (it didn't work nearly as well as we'd hoped) but those wheels have kept on being awesome. People still look at the machine and ask about the wheels... allowing me to give a brief lecture on vector mechanics. Our design choice might not have accomplished its mission on the field.... but as far as inspiring science and technology discussions it is still hard at work six years later.

Sure, if you have the time and resources you could build an off-season bot (especially if you are going for the hovercraft drive), or just demonstrate mecanums and treads using VEX... but that isn't quite as cool as having it on a "real" machine.

So kudos for asking advice... you've got plenty of good advice so far in this column... but honestly, if Orville and Wilbur Wright had taken good advice they would have packed up and gone back to their bicycle shop.

Of course, Orville did darn near kill himself flying one of those things. Ignore the advice at your own peril... but feel free to ignore it!

Jason