pic: Butterfly Drive Concept

[hectorcastillo]

Originally Posted by TheHolyHades1

The addition of the slide drive is cool, but I think the extra wheel in the center is unnecessary - you'll should be just fine using a single wheel in the middle.

It looks like the two center wheels are part of a tipping kicker wheel that applies a force into the ground when it tips. We used this design this year, and it worked out pretty well for us.

I would suggest supporting all of your wheel modules on both side, instead of cantilevering them on one side.

Another thing that I noticed is that if you break a belt on your drive train, you have to literally disassemble the frame in order to put another belt on. You definitely want to figure out a way to make replacing belts easier and actually possible.

You should also consider swapping the positions of your wheels so that the modules pivot off of your traction wheels. Last summer I designed a drivetrain very similar to this one with the same wheel configuration, but one of my mentors pointed out that you're going to be hitting and pushing against people primarily with your traction wheels and the resulting contact might damage the modules in the current configuration. If you swap them, most of the energy will go into the stronger frame which is what you want.