pic: Team XBot Mecanum Practice Chassis

[Madison]

Originally Posted by GMKlenklen

okok, now you gotta try driving it up some stairs like the airtrax did!!! Please? oh, and ramps too...

Btw, I can't quite tell, do you have suspension on it? or did that get left out?

If we have a chance, we'll try running it across all sorts of weird surfaces and objects to see how it behaves. We have our ramp from last season around somewhere and I'm already considering mechanisms that'll allow it to climb curbs and stairs and the like.

Worse comes to worst, we have a reliable design for a simple 6WD drive train waiting in the wings. I can post CAD models of that as well, if folks are interested.

The suspension is implemented, but not quite as we'd originally intended. Because we wanted to get this thing running, we improvised a bit and used both tennis and racquet balls as suspension springs. You can see the bright green and dark blue balls in the video and photos. The tennis balls give a better ride height, but don't compress as easily as the racquet balls, so the jury's still out on which we'd use for competition. More testing is required.