pic: Jester Drive:Mecanum Wheel Drive Train

[EricH]

Originally Posted by techtiger1

as the engineer from beach bots said think and have a back up plan before u get into doing this. Making these is extremely labor intensive and you have to make them from scratch I have seen prints for wheels like 357 and there a whole off season's worth of work as Alex stated.

I'm not an engineer, I'm a student. Thanks for the compliment.

Making the wheel we had at nationals (for display only) took about 2 years from initial concept through prototyping to the wheel. The first year: After seeing the ones used to remove containers from airplanes, my dad decided to try to make some. By the end of the summer, we had a set for the Robovation kit. We also had the programming to operate it. The second year: two experimental wheels were made, similar in design to the current ones. When we decided to try them this year and keep six wheels as a reserve, we had a set made. However, when we tested that set, we found that it did not have enough traction, and we could not get another set of rollers designed and built in time to test them before ship, so we went with six wheel drive. We had the textured rollers made before ship day, but have not tested to find out which roller tread is best. More testing to come at a later date.

One set of wheels can be made in about 3 days, from part production to assembly to mounting on a robot.